Yan's dagger scored a deep line across the beast's chest as he swayed beneath its strike.

Its leap propelled it past him, and it twisted in midair so that its hindpaws met the trunk of a tree. It sprung off, launching itself back at him. Its fanged maw opened wide, and pinkish fog fumed out; blood-poison. Its snarl carried the fog out on the humid air.

Unfortunately for it, its poisons weren't the only ones at work. Yan had coated his blades with one of his qi-disruption poisons, and with how deep his blade had bit it was only the measure of seconds before the beast coughed and gagged, choking on its own breath, and the thick fog dispersed into shreds.

They clashed again, the beast's body hot against his own, and this time Yan's dagger neatly sunk into the underside of its jaw, emerging within its open maw to penetrate the roof of its mouth. The blade was just long enough to nick the brain before he pulled it free in a torrent of gore, and the beast spasmed and thrashed, rolling on the ground in a messy seizure. Yan darted in between the blind thrashing of its paws and sunk his blade in its eye, burying it to the hilt. The beast's thrashing tore the weapon from his hand, but that wasn't important; the thrashing had turned to death spasms.

The beast was a poisonbloom jaguar. Its coat grew green-and-pink in mazy spots, with a mantle of pink flowers budding from its very flesh; good camouflage for the flower clearing it had claimed as its den. The hide was unfortunately fairly ruined, draping down its sides in bloody rents; it'd taken more than a few slices across its back and sides before Yan had managed the killing blow.

There was a loud crash next to him as the beast's mate fell from the trees above, throat messily torn out. Neru thumped to the ground a moment later, daintily, for all that his muzzle was a mess of blood. He crunched down, shattering the other beast's core in his mouth, and Yan huffed in amusement as the crunching continued, slowly subsiding in volume he gulped down ground monster core mixed with mouthfuls of fresh blood. He leaned down, tentacles writhing in satisfaction as he tore off a chunk of meat from the fresh corpse to add to the bloody slurry filling his mouth.

Yan was little more dainty with his kill. He leaned down to pluck his dagger from the beast's skull, and pulled it free with a wet wrench. He flopped the beast over on its back and sunk the blade into its chest, feeling along the muscle grain as it parted, until he felt the bulge of its core just beneath its ribs and neatly twisted around it. The core spat itself from the wound into his palm, still oozing blood and ichor. The final twitches of the beast stilled abruptly as its core was removed, body little more than dead weight.

He cinched its hind legs together with rope and tossed the coil over the lowest branch that would suffice, then hauled it up to hang. He slit its throat, collecting the blood in an empty water jug he nudged into position below. Only slightly poisoned; the alchemists could be able to use the blood still.

They'd scented the beasts on the outward leg of their trip, but it would've been a waste to kill them then. Now, low on supplies and with only a half-day's travel back to the village, the fresh meat was a {satisfying addition}, rather than a total waste.

Neru had shoved his muzzle inside the beast's chest cavity, already tearing free its heart. Yan finished hanging the other corpse in time to fight him for the liver.

Sweaty and aching from the battle, and with time to kill for the multi-hour process of draining blood, and now with a full belly of raw meat and beast liver, Yan sat down to cultivate. The qi in the clearing was thicker than most, though still faint -- a nascent spirit spring, with slight but perceptible qi thickening. Life-attuned, which fed the herbs growing in clumps.

Early in life, Yan's spiritual root had been aligned towards shadow, like many in the village. Spiritual roots grew and changed alongside the person, sometimes from practice and intention, sometimes from chance, and sometimes for other reasons. Over the years, Yan and Neru's roots had shifted to align with each other -- they wielded a dark, potent energy, more intense than the affinity towards shifting forest shadows that was the more common manifestation of the root. An intense umbral power, cloying and deep, but that was still only half of it. 'Void', they called it, for lack of a better word.

Consequently, his cultivation base was hardly shared with the others of the village, despite the seeming similarity: no murkbloom flowers and inkveil mushrooms to fortify his constitution, as with the other shadow-hunters. It was hardly uncommon to have similar-seeming affinities contrast. The jaguars here, for example, were known to have poison and life affinities, in a harmonious union. Meanwhile, Yan's secondary qi root, aligned to poison in its aspect of water -- seeping, subtle, mercurial -- opposed the life qi of the clearing. There were as many varieties of qi as there were bugs in the forest, and what found union seemed sometimes more a matter of thought and self-conception than anything crudely physical. They weren't just mixing liquors in a jar to see what tasted good.

He, personally, found the dissonance with the life qi bearing down on him helpful, for all that it sapped at his internal reservoirs. If there wasn't a harmonious qi to be had, Yan found that one that was actively dissonant was better than one that was merely lukewarm.

Cultivation was the process of uplifting the body and soul, unifying them together into a hybrid being. But bodies were made of crude matter, and not built for enlightenment. The meridian channels were born weak and failing, and over time, in the process of life, the body took in toxins that clogged them further. Each acupoint was a nexus where power whorled, but even at the moment of a baby's firth breath they began corroding, clogged from impurities in the air. It was a miracle to even have the potential to cultivate, but it took work, unceasing.

He'd already cleared one meridian entirely: straight down his spine. Qi flowed clean and deep through that open channel; a clean river carved through the murky swamp of his body. It was enough to make it clear how shallow and polluted the rest of his meridians were.

The first meridian Neru had unlocked had been his stomach, the glutton. His meridians were different -- all kinds were different. But humans had the advantage of there being many other humans to compare to, with teachers and heroes forging a path ahead. None of that applied to Neru.

Yan dug away at the stuck nodes in his chest, high up along the meridian that begun at the tip of his right middle finger. The simple meridian of the arm, it was called: the shortest meridian in the arm muscle, and the easiest to open. The bestial poison qi in his gut helped, sending a surge of energy into him as he sunk deeper into his trance.

Life qi flowed cleanly up his arm, burning, finger to palm to wrist to forearm to upper arm, but slowly the uncleared acupoints higher up stymied the flow. The channel became clogged and the flow of qi stagnated, only slowly seeping around blockages. The flow reached his chest, passed through the hollow of his middle dantian, and sluggishly oozed back, impurities slightly buffered within the flow by the torrent of beastial qi bubbling up from his stomach.

The flow of tainted qi looped around the back of his arm and down again to finally meet back up at his fingertip -- {ring finger}, this time -- to expel qi thoroughly tainted with impurities through its travel through his body. Yan worked at the sluggish, swampy latter half of the meridian, the action half-physical and half-spiritual: like clenching muscles, like tracing a shape, like dreaming. Like working with wet clay, fingers probing, feeling the grain of the material as it deformed under his touch. Beads of green-black sweat oozed out of his fingertip, the physical component of the impure qi.

The messy admixture burbled through him, peeling flakes of spiritual substance off, dissolving into his channels and making them run thicker and slower-- but every flake dissolved was a flake no longer hindering the flow. He cycled and cycled, slowly feeling some blockages begin to give way, with others stiffening further from the shifting impurities. There was only so much progress he could expect, cultivating in these circumstances.

But any progress was better than none, and he had the blood-clock of the beast's body to time him. He made {57} cycles before he lost count, and a timeless expanse beyond that until the slowing drip of blood from the {beast}'s body brought him back to the surface. Neru had slumped against him, bored, and he eagerly hopped to his feet, back arcing in a feline stretch, as he felt Yan surface from his cultivation.

Yan stood, surveying the drained body. The jug had overflowed, but only just, with rich beast blood streaking down the side of the jug to seep into the soil. It would fertilize the herbs here, he supposed.

The clearing where they had fought was forming into a natural locus, and the vegetation reflected that: thick bunches of strange plants grew in clumps throughout, and among them Yan recognized several that deserved further inspection. The only one he was certain he could identify was {daoshi}, a low-growing herb with broad, rumpled leaves and a coarse yellow stalk. {daoshi} was the primary ingredient for a particularly weak and slow-acting purification tea popular back in Takire -- popular precisely for its weakness. They fed it to teething babies along with mother's milk to acclimate them to qi infusions, and there were always more children than there was tea to go around. Each day an unfortified child survived was a minor miracle in itself, even in the most well-defended of villages.

Anyone who even begun to have thoughts about becoming a hunter or guardian would need to gulp down the tea until it stopped having any effect, and work their way through another half-dozen simple supplements until they topped out on those too. All that just laid the foundation for the barest hope of fighting a forest beast; it took many supplements to even begin the process of meridian cleansing, which was needed to become a proper hunter or village guardian.

They had terms for it, grades and rarities of power and potential, but the only true rule was that so long as your body processed the supplements: flesh hardening, muscle empowering, bone unleashing, it was worth taking more. They sorted pills and teas and tinctures into categories and tiers; eventually supplements of a given tier stopped aiding one's progress, and it was time to move on to the next, with ever more rarefied ingredients required. By that metric, Yan had fair potential, and was reasonably powerful for his age. Perhaps he was unusually dedicated to make up his unusual spiritual root that prevented him from using many of their traditional supplements. Or maybe void qi was simply more responsive than others, and he was just as lazy and laid-back as he seemed.

Yan stooped and cut off a big bunch of {daoshi} at the stem with one hand, while he rooted around in his pack with the other, eventually unearthing a ball of lumpy twine. He bound the herbs into a proper bundle and wrapped the base with a cloth he wetted with some of the spilt beast blood.

He pressed his {ring finger} against the wrap, slowly infusing it with his water qi. No hand-signs required. Even clogged meridians could be used, and the hands and feet were rich with meridian channels: one opening at each fingertip and another at the bone of the wrist, forming a complex lacework of connections throughout the hand and arm. Until a cultivator had the capacity and control that was brought with an open meridian, hand-signs that physically manipulated the meridian into a useful configuration for a given technique were necessary. For something as simple as exuding qi aligned with his spiritual root, he'd long ago graduated from needing hand-signs. It was a simple exercise, even if here he was using the whole of his cultivator experience to act as vase for a clump of herbs.

All that done, he stoppered the jug, brimming now with blood. He hauled the beast corpse down and slung it over his shoulders: heavy, but not an impossible weight to carry back to the village. The other corpse was mostly resting inside Neru's gut; the fang-lacerated hide and marrow-drained bones might still have their uses, but not ones worth carting the ruined corpse all the way back.

It would be scarcely the rest of the day's travel back, now, and it would be best to get back sooner rather than later -- when they reached the cliffside, the view let him see that black clouds had gathered on the horizon, with dark lightning starting to flicker between them. An unseasonable voidstorm, and coming on faster than usual. hopefully that meant it would burn itself out quicker than usual, too.

-- [CHAPTER 2 BREAK HEREISH]

The jungle lived by many cycles. At the height of the rainy season, the river's banks swelled, and a week's travel downstream from the village it reversed its direction. Floodwaters poured up a tributary, bringing salty black water into the swamp, fresh from the sea. The swamp strained its bounds, its springs overflowing, and new streams sent tendrils out into the rest of the jungle, until after {weeks or months} the floodwaters abated and the river reversed its course again, slowly draining brackish water from the swamp until it ran fresh again. That cycle came by right on schedule, year after year.

Other cycles were less predictable: rain came and went, but an unseasonably dry season lead to springs drying up and scattered fires, and an unseasonably wet season lead to rotten sprouts and lean harvests. Voidstorms swept through every few years, usually {at the first true heat of the wet season}. Low-lying clouds would sweep across the sky, unnaturally dark. Intense blue-purple lightning would strike down, and what it struck, it changed. Sometimes in ways that were useful, and sometimes not: rotting living-wood, deformed beasts, rock mazed with veins of unknown metals. The air would fill with a charge, something intense and building. The animals would go into a frenzy.

The true danger was in navigation: sometimes, blundering around, you'd step across a path that was not like it was. An animal trail with strange prints. A fork in the river where none had been before. And if you followed it, you'd end up somewhere else. Different trees, different water. The dirt stuck differently. The air shone strangely. The sky was a different tone. The storm opened ways: into the realm of unknown gods; or to a place where spirits played with the souls of men. In the shaded tangle of roots beneath a river mangrove, there was an opening into bone-dry realms of black rock and pale white sand; between the triangle of space where a fallen tree rested against its neighbor, there was a bunch of alien flowers growing on intense red soil. Ways that took you outside.

If you were lucky, you realized where you'd turned off the true path before it was too late, and you returned to the world. If you were unlucky, you were never heard from again. And if you were _real_ unlucky, you returned, and something followed you.

The end-leg of their trip was nowhere near as eventful as that. The voidstorm remained looming clouds near the horizon, and the winds carried it alongside them, not closer. The lingering scent of beast blood that coated them both was a good deterrent for the meeker forest beasts. They made their way quickly, through the shadows, and they had grown long by the time they met up with the beaten path beyond the village. Dusk was falling, sky rich purple, as they approached Takire through its final twists and turns. They slowed, jumping from branch to branch instead of squirming through the shadows as murky ink-blots of darkness.

The final turn, where the path broadened as they emerged from the forest to the half-flooded paddy fields that surrounded the village, was still like a breath of clear air. The wild qi of the forest weighed heavily on them: neither of them were made for it. The qi by the village was thinner, but more familiar. A hearth, a bed, a larder: these were the traces writ into the qi of the village; things that were unknown to the forest.

Across the fields, there was a watchman visible at the top of the tower overlooking the palisade, tense and alert. His concerned eyes focused on the slight stirring of the trees where Yan and Neru had landed, and they could see his posture shift: fingers curl around his spear, ready to smack the haft into the gong, sounding an alarm. Yan stepped forward and waved.

"Hoy!" the watchman called, loud enough to span the distance. And then lower, to the side, where volume and distance would have silenced the sound were it not for the enhanced hearing Yan had picked up from Neru: "It's just {lastname} Yan and his mutt." Neru's mane-tentacles thrashed in irritation. Yan laughed a little.

The paddy fields sprawled out along the upstream crescent of the village, separated into a haphazard collection of off-angle rectangles. Pathways branched off along some of the edges, a few lined with coppiced trees, forming a web of thin trails along the paddy's edge. It was a few minute's walk, slow and leisurely, up the path, until they stood before the palisade.

Neru had taken issue with the 'mutt' comment. He'd been biding his time. The watchman leaned over the watchtower balcony, to see them standing at the closed gates. Neru melted into a blob of shadow, and Yan just barely caught his shadow-body streaking over the palisade and spiraling up the watchtower before he emerged at the top. There was a surprised shriek and a loud _thump_ as the guard fell out of sight. Yan followed him up, emerging on the viewing platform with Neru pinning {guard} to the ground with one huge paw, affectionately chewing on the forearm he'd thrown up reflexively to defend himself.

Yan shifted the weight of the beast balanced across his back. "You're lucky I don't dump this on you," he said, shrugging his shoulders to make the corpse perched across his shoulders ripple and lurch, "and make you do the butchering duties."

"You hunters," {guard 2} said, the other guard leaning against the view platform railing. He was looking down at {guard} pinned on the floor, visibly thankful he hadn't done the calling. "All you do is laze around the village, making everybody else do your work for you." The addition of a slight scoff at the end meant it was all in good fun.

Yan snorted. "Don't you start." He nudged Neru's haunch with a toe. "C'mon, if you take any longer, I'll make _you_ carry the body."

Neru snarled down at {guard}, inner teeth chomping. "I'll be back for _my_ {recompense} later," he said, stepping back and letting {guard} shove himself up to his elbows, face flushed.

Yan snorted. He bet he would. "Oh, tell master {trainer} i'm back," he said, with a backward wave. "I'll be at {butcher}'s." They'd send a runner with the message. He launched himself off the balcony, dropping down physically instead of as a mass of shadow-stuff, and Neru followed after him, landing silently beside him. They didn't have to open the gate for them, after all.

Takire was laid out roughly in the shape of two opposing spirals: one mostly homes, weavers, and gardens; the other mostly laborers, smiths, and carpenters. The palisade was a sinuous trail, looping around the village, only breaking for the watergate sections on the river. Where the curves came close was the main run of the village, and the tallest buildings had been built there, with daubed-clay foundations and several stories of wood-and-paper walls -- the main storehouse, the training halls, the chief's office, the lodge.

The butcher and tannery was a ways down the worker's spiral, on the far side of the river, over the bridge from the waterwheel-powered mill. The thick reek of {tanning chemicals} stuck to the wooden beams in a sticky grime, so built-up along the rafters it had congealed in resinous drops.

{butcher}, the butcher, wasn't entirely pleased to have a giant monster corpse dumped on him in the night.

"Adequately drained," {butcher} said. Then, complaining: "You couldn't have gutted it, too?"

"Do you want me to do _all_ your work for you?" Yan said. "Should I carry a tanning tub out with me on the hunt?"

"Fine, fine," {butcher} said, grumbling. He grunted as Yan shifted the weight of the beast over to his shoulders, and Yan stretched with a groan, both hands straight up in the air. Carrying a beast corpse for most of the day had been more taxing than he liked. They were not light beasts.

If village commerce worked as smoothly as some thought it could, he would be able to dump everything else with the quartermaster and call it a night. As it was, they split up, was parceling off the various herbs and reagents they'd recovered, based on who was likely to still be up and working at this hour.

			The smith's apprentice -- and son -- {smith}, was broad and brawny, with a muscular barrel-chest and a swollen keg of a gut under his heavy leather apron. He'd been a fat kid, and as an adult he'd grown into a giant of a man, broad all over. He was dark-skinned, with short-cropped coppery hair that was bleached half-blond from the sun. His patchy facial hair of a few years hence was growing into a reputable blacksmith's beard, oiled and heavy, braided from the chin and clasped where it hung to the bottom of his pecs with an old ring of worked copper. His forearms were burnt hairless and nearly-always blackened with soot from the furnace, up past where his gloves reached.

			It wasn't unusual for him or his family to be hammering long after the sound started to annoy others, loud in the dusk quiet. That was the price for living near the riverside.

			Yan raised a hand as he approached. "Hail," he said, and {smith} raised his head from his anvil, face splitting into a grin. He had been hammering out nails.

			"You're back!"

			"Just finished unloading a beast corpse onto {butcher}," Yan said, to {smith}'s laugh. "Think you can do something with this?" Yan flipped the core over. "I think it was at {third stage, maybe fourth}."

{smith} made an appraising hum and raised it close to his right eye, inspecting the core intently. He rotated it slowly, letting its internal facets catch the candlelight. "Sure, sure. It should serve for a batch of spiritual bronze," he said. "How are your daggers holding up, anyway?"

Yan pulled one from its hip sheath and twirled the hilt around across his fingers, blade a silvery flash in the night. Spiritual bronze of the {nth} degree, laminated with dissolved snakefang to give it a milky sheen and aid in channeling his poison qi. It had been forged by {smith}'s father, the smith. {smith} didn't look impressed with his fingerwork. "Worked well against the beasts. Still as fine as ever."

"And how goes Neru?"

One of {smith}'s goals was to forge equipment for Neru that suited him more than his claws and teeth did. Neru _could_ hold a short blade in his jaws, and he'd been grudgingly trained in the basic cutting forms that could possibly apply to a four-legged animal, but he preferred his claws to cut. His jaw was for biting down, hard. {smith} had yet to invent anything that was more than a momentary curiosity.

"Still biting," he admitted.

{smith} shrugged. If he let his failures frustrate him, he'd been a much less pleasant guy to be around. Still... "it would be nice if there were _any_ beastmasters around who could aim me true," he groused, a little.

	Neru wasn't a wolf or a dog or anything like that. they called him a _voidhound_ because he was more _like_ a hound than anything else.

	He had a bulky, top-heavy frame, like a hyena. He came up past Yan's hip, but not quite to his chest. When he jumped up on his hind legs, they were actually very close to the same height. His front feet were something like paws; his hind feet were something swept back and reptilian: broadly splayed with dense, gristled webbing between his talons. He had something like fur covering most of his skin, thicker across his back before his mane sprouted into tentacles up his spine. His underbelly was less haired, in ragged stripes, with pebbly, dark grey flesh closer to reptile scute than anything else. What fur he had was shimmery and strange, maybe closer to solid shadow than fur in truth, and it was mazed with zig-zagging stripes across his chest and sides with ribbons of pure ink-black void, black-on-black. His head was skull-like, whorls of dense white bone or shell. The same material surfaced again down his spine, amid his mane-tentacles, and again with scaly patches where his joints pressed against flesh. His jaw cracked open into a fanged maw, with one row of jagged teeth in the bone-like material of his head, and then two more rows inside, as actual teeth. He had five vertical cracks in a rising-sun half-circle across his face and brow, and sunk within each one was a black eye like a shiny marble. They fumed purple-black fog when he was channeling qi. His mane-tentacles sprouted from between his jackal-like ears to back behind his shoulders: fat tubes, dry and smooth with a faint pebbly rumple, almost blubbery in their heft. his tail, sprouting from his haunches, was a similar structure; his tongue was near-identical, save for the drool: three-or-four branching, prehensile tentacles he usually kept pinned together, but when he was panting for breath he fanned them out, each tongue a splayed hand, slobbering inky drool all down his split tongues to cool off.

	Nobody knew what he was. Yan had found him after a voidstorm when he was far too young to be ranging as far from the village as he had been. Everybody else had wanted to kill it. It was an unknown thing, changed or dragged from the outside during a voidstorm. Who knew what it was capable of. There was some concern over his family, specifically, taking in what may have been a cursed beast.

	Voidstorms were never good omens, and the ones that blew in from the deep woods, coming from the ruins of the old empire, were considered to bear particular ill fortune. In the end, it probably had come down to something as simple as that; the recent voidstorm had been transverse to the deep woods, and so was only mildly unfortunate. Not the worst omen that could be. And Neru had been helpless and harmless, like a pup whose eyes had yet to open.

	Yan had learned it tolerated goat milk the best, although it had taken him ransacking his mother's, the alchemist, stores. A young Neru had tottered through vials and bags of reagents, sniffing for something it tried to suckle on. He'd tried fortifying the milk with {shadowsac venom}. Nobody had been pleased to see stacks of prized {reagents} fed down a hungry monster's gullet.

	But hadn't it all been worth it in the end, with the two of them becoming the village's {hallmark} defenders? Not the strongest, not yet, but with their shared shadow-step, and the combined endurance of a human and the fleetness of a voidhound they were by far the fastest and most wide-ranging hunters of Takire.

	Neru had stubbornly refused to ever learn any tricks, despite Yan's great struggle as a kid to try. (Neru said that of the two of them, Yan was the one more amenable to being trained.) They hadn't expected it to start talking -- four or five years after his adoption, when Yan had been nine. His voice was a low growl, utterly inhuman but still, largely, comprehensible.

	Their qi aligning wasn't entirely surprising. Beastmasters passed through the village, not uncommonly, and it was common knowledge that the qi between contracted beasts slowly aligned together. Yan had a budding shadow affinity, even at an early age, and whatever union they'd had had thoroughly dragged his spiritual root in the direction of Neru's void affinity. It was a new power, a strange power, and one that he hadn't regretted gaining even once, despite the frustrating parts.

		Yan _had_ been uncertain about the mutant tentacle dick. Neru had a strange, uncanny power within him, and Yan found himself absorbing the least amount of it. The initial realignment of his body's qi with the voidhound's had been, in a word, _cool_. His nails warping into black claws, faintly tipped, had been exciting: the first outside proof that his qi was changing.

		He'd drunk all his teas and tinctures; he'd been so eager to have his body become a weapon, a fortress, and not just a wobbly, spongy sack of viscera. Being a child, being weak, had been intolerable. Growing claws had been incredible. His hair, already a fairly dark red, had deepened to a true black. His tongue, too, turning ink-black, along with the inner flesh of his mouth? A little strange, maybe offputting to people at first glance, but still, it was something shocking, special, uncanny. He liked grinning at people to reveal chunky, shining fangs framed with black flesh. He hadn't yet had a second row of teeth emerge, but he wouldn't object if they did. Neru could wiggle each row independently.

		The dick, though. he'd been in exclusive hunter-elect training since he was ten summers, which meant that at sixteen, when _that_ change had started, he hadn't even had the usual furtive fumbling in the barracks with his fellow cultivator-candidates. It was one thing to gawk at lizardmen fucking in the river with the other kids, something hot and sparking tingling across his front and focusing on his dick whenever they saw a peek of bulging, red-purple flesh between their mating bodies, but it was something entirely else to have an ink-black tentacle _unspool_ from inside him, oozing murky black preseed all over.

		He had tried to think about -- {young satyr}, the mean spearman, looking down at the writhing eel that was his tentacle dick and _not_ coming up with something cutting and cruel to say; {smith}, the blacksmith's son, broad face grinning, sun-bleached hair across his chest soaked down under inky lines of black goop; {spearman}, the noble warrior, poised and perfect, flinching as his cock sputtered out a slashing line of oily black droplets across his perfect silk pants. For every man who laid with the elkmen when they came to trade glittering glass beads, there were ten more who stuck to their own kind, and Yan was no longer entirely his own kind.

		Well, everybody said {young satyr} had a goat dick, anyway.

		It turned out he needn't have worried about {smith}, after all.

		He'd been tracking Neru one night, after they'd gotten an unexpected order to turn up at master {trainer}'s the next morning at dawn for an early assignment. His scent was rich in the air, and he'd gotten so occupied tracking it that he hadn't been paying attention to where, exactly, the scent was leading him to.

			The smith's yard was enclosed: a high wall on the side facing the road, a thick fringe of bamboo on another, with the L of the building and workshop forming the other two sides.

			Perched on the top of the wall, Yan could see everything. there was {smith}, on his knees, eagerly playing the bitch while Neru mounted him from behind. His jaw was slavering open, tongues and head-tentacles a dripping mess coiled forward around {smith}, enveloping him head-and-shoulders in a writhing mass of pulsing black flesh. The tentacles were taut, yanking his back into a sharp arch, while Neru's paws dragged bleeding furrows across his fat hips. His belly swung beneath him, musclegut gone slack in the middle of his breeding, and each thrust made it sway and jiggle, rocking forward to press against his broad, ink-glazed pecs.

			Neru's nascent knot made a lewd _pop_ each time it burst from his well-fucked ass, adding a fresh splatter of cloudy black preseed to the hard-packed dirt below. {smith} was sobbing, froth squirting out from between Neru's coils wrapped around his face. His muffled groans turned into sloppy gurgles as Neru shoved a tentacle down his throat, and his entire body shuddered as his cock spat out a messy gush of cum into the puddle of black slime beneath.

			Yan didn't know how long he watched them before he realized they'd seen him. Neru had peeled his tentacles away from {smith}'s face, and his slack, dazed expression was nevertheless aimed right at his perch. His cock ached in his loincloth, bulge obscene, with his own murky preseed soaking through the fabric.

			He toppled forward into the yard, barely sticking the landing, and it only took the slightest tug on the side of his pouch before his cock unfurled with a meaty wet _thwack_. his sheath tentacles quested out, twisting around his unsheathing cock as it spilled out, looping into knotted curls that smacked against both his thighs, before there was the rubbery _spang_ as his turgid knot popped out from within him as his sheath everted entirely.

			His cock swayed before him in a long, sinuous arch, like a snake curled up to strike. There was a thudding in his chest that preempted thought. Sensation burst hot and intense across his body. There was just pressure, heat, slickness, the chill of the air and the warmth of body heat.

			He'd taken a few wobbling steps forward, cock leading the way. His sheath tentacles twisted around his knot, milking himself, and he'd gushed out oily streamers of pre across the yard. {smith}'s face: handsome, cheerful, friendly, was almost unrecognizable, dazed and slack in lust. He was half-blind, eyes gummed over with slime. He gurgled, and Neru's black drool bubbled out over his lower lip, soaking his beard and sheeting down his bare chest in grimy lines. He'd begged for it: mouth open, tongue protruding, shakily whimpering as Neru hammered into him from behind. When Yan closed the distance, cocktip licking across his face like a giant tongue, he'd squeezed his eyes shut, whimpering, and came again, untouched.

			His throat had already been fucked open by Neru's tentacles. Yan, when he'd been jerking off, after the change, had thought that just the chunky, wrist-thick span of his shaft would been a lot for anyone to take. {smith} gulped Yan's cock down easy, broad lips open in an obscene swell as he desperately nursed on his pointed, doggish cocktip. He'd hungrily swallowed down mouthful after mouthful of inky slime. The tip had squirmed against both cheeks, twisting around in a warped lemniscate to bulge them both out, before writhing down the back of his mouth, teasing his tonsils.

			{smith} gagged, spit-thinned black slime squirting from his nose and mouth, and Yan had just groaned at the sight and sunk himself into his throat, sloppily fucking his cock deeper. The tentacle-muscle of his cock could squirm around, looping and curling into knots, but he could also flex it firm, swelling it and straightening it out into a hard, long spear. He stiffened his cock down {smith}'s throat, sliding it through his sloppy, pre-lubed passage, and even through the mess of froth clinging to his then-patchy beard it was easy to see the way his throat warped from inside, swelling out around the animal, inhuman bulge of Yan's voidhound cock.

			{smith} had gurgled and moaned, eyes wide and pleading as Yan had fed him more cock, sinking down until his cocktip had shoved through the spasming opening at the bottom of his throat to sink directly into his stomach, and {smith}'s eyes had rolled back in his head, just the whites showing, as he'd cum all over himself -- it had been intense.

			It certainly hadn't been {smith}'s first time with Neru. Yan's knot had smacked against his bruised lips, a pulsing heart that has seemed so, so enormous, and {smith} had simply opened wider and taken it into his mouth with a squelch. Yan's sheath tentacles had webbed out across his head, sloppily tangling with Neru's fatter tentacles still looped across his neck and chest, and together they'd bound {smith's} head tight, pinning him in place around his knot. {smith} had gurgled, bulging flesh pulsing against his teeth, but he hadn't choked.

			Yan's knot thudded against his teeth, growing fatter. He'd latched for the first time in {smith}'s mouth, and dumped his first true load: gummy preseed gave way to foaming, watery voidhound cum, pissed out in an unceasing flow straight into {smith}'s stomach. {smith} knew when to clench, when to swallow and exhale. He blew oily black bubbles from his nose as he breathed around the huge knot clogging his mouth. He'd had practice.

			So that was _his_ first time, spitroasting and double-knotting a guy in a threesome with his pet hound, and pumping the guy so full of their combined loads that he'd looked pregnant afterwards. Not to let Neru hear that; he didn't appreciate being called a pet. It was hard not to make the comparison, with {smith} between them: on his hands and knees, being treated like their breeding bitch.

			(After that, the dawn meeting with {trainer} had turned into an emergency hunting trip to track down a man-eating lizard that had emerged from deeper in the forest. A week later, when they'd returned with a roll of neatly-butchered lizardhide and a pair of fangs as long as his forearm, {smith} had turned {beet red} as they'd talked with the smith and then, still flushed and flustered, caught their eyes and jerked his head to the side. They'd met him first in his bunkroom for a hasty blowjob and then again later that night to see just how wide they could stretch him around their twin knots. It wasn't until their third time that he got over his bashfulness towards Yan and started loudly demanding they stuff their fat monster cocks into his hungry cunt. They'd bred him until he looked ready to burst, and he'd still begged for more.)

	So call it {nostalgia/reminiscence}, that Yan delivered his portion of the hunt's prize in person. They weren't needed at the hunter's outpost until morning, after all, which left where they were staying the night an entirely open question.

	Neru was off repaying {guard} for calling him a mutt, which probably meant he was gonna be busy being facefucked for most of the evening. Last time Yan had -- accidentally! -- interrupted them, he'd walked in on {guard} collared, on his hands and knees, with Neru dragging him around by a leash. He was not interested in learning anything else about whatever it was they had going on there.

All that was to say, {smith} wasn't working off a template. Neru wasn't some hunting dog who needed a collar and a brush. Yan hadn't said yet, probably Neru _would_ appreciate a collar, but only if {smith} made it for himself. Neru would enjoy being the one to put it on {smith}. Yan wouldn't mind that at all. But {smith} was presumably looking for something more practical.

	That being said, here and now Yan had {smith} all to himself, at least for a while. The latest journey had taken five days, and he'd been too occupied with the {rigors} of travel to bother jerking off. His sac ached, with thick clots of half-congealed sludge lurching and popping through the dense, mazy coils within. He had his own loads to take off.

	Yan got to breed him twice, mouth and ass both, before Neru showed up.

	By that time, {smith} was an ichor-coated mess, with cords of gritty sludge painting his face, soaking through his beard like ink on a brush, with excess oozing down his neck and over his fat pecs. More squirted from his knot-ruined ass and drooled down between his thighs. He'd always thought {smith} looked the best when he was painted in their loads. Their cum stained deep, painting his skin dark purple for a few days before it came out, making it completely unmistakable who he'd been used by. The thought always sent a heated ripple through Yan's dick. Just watching his inky black voidcum leaking out around his half-knotted ass had kept him cumming for another few minutes, enjoying the spill of dark fluid slowly coating his ass and sheeting down his thighs. Every little splatter would show on his skin, inky purple-black stains on his red-brown skin, building up in dots and lines, webs of froth, until he looked tattooed in the stuff.

	He jerked {smith} off with one ichor-coated hand, staining his cock black, while the other played with his gaped asslips: thumb stroking the rumpled swell of his puffy lips while his fingers sunk inside, churning up the murky froth of his load until it squirted out around his wrist in foaming spouts.

	"Ready for the both of us?" Yan had growled, as Neru had padded closer, cock already hungrily licking out between his haunches. To Neru: "I've had his mouth and ass both. Which do you want to start with?"

	Neru's eyes tracked the way Yan's fist was sinking into his gaped ass. Each pump displaced a silty wash of black voidcum, staining Yan's forearm as much as it stained {smith}'s broad ass. He didn't answer with words, just hopped up onto his {mattress}, cocktip smearing along Yan's forearm to pierce inside him and add his own preseed to the messy slurry of issue filling him up.

	---

			"If I'd known bedding the {hero of the town} would've involved so much mess, I might've rethought rolling over and presenting myself as your bitch," {smith} said with a guffaw from his reclining pose in bed.

			They were in a lull between breedings. Yan's loads had half-dried across his skin, painting dark lines all down his chest and thighs and soaking eagerly into his already-stained sheets. His sheets, which had started as the same pale yellow-white tone as all the rest of their simple {hemp fabric}, were now nearly dyed purple-black. At this point his sheets would look better if they finished the job; a set of regal purple-black sheets would sell for a fine price, if Yan and Neru didn't mind being milked dry for each batch.

			"No," Neru said, a voidtongue smugly lolling from his muzzle to lick across his lips. "You would've begged even more. Look at you, rolling in our mess like a needy bitch."

			Yan rolled his eyes. Neru had a bit of unearned arrogance to him, he thought. Actually--

			"Mmn," {smith} hummed, grinning. "I'm not sure I would've. How about you give me another go, just to make sure."

			Well, actually, if it worked, it worked, Yan thought, as Neru mounted his face for his third round. Yan stayed where he was, head next to {smith}'s broad thigh, just enjoying the sensation of his tentacle-dick grinding against {smith}'s calf.

			Once {smith} started gurgling on Neru's knot, gut swelling as another jug-or-so of voidhound cum was pumped straight into his stomach, Yan decided to stop lazily humping his leg like a dog and get in on the action. {smith}'s cock was stiff and waggling against his sagging gut, letting out a glossy bead of pre with each sloppy squelch that burst from his fucked-open throat. Yan squirmed to the side, opened wide, and licked a messy stripe up his drooling cock before he took the whole thing into his mouth. he groaned, gulping around his shuddering shaft, and pressed his forehead against the soft flesh of {smith}'s gut, nose buried in his curly pubes.

			{smith} was still loose from his latest fucking; it was easy to sink his fist into him down to the elbow and slowly fingerfuck the opening to his guts. {smith} squealed, puffy asshole slurping around Yan's fist, and his back arched, grinding his face deeper into his gut as Yan milked out a load that splattered against the back of his mouth, rich and faintly salt-bitter. He spent his own load into the sheets, soaking out the last splotches of white and saturating the dappled stuffing inside the mattress besides.

		they ended up bedding at {smith}'s house for the night, though they didn't get all that much sleep. well, {smith} passed out halfway through, but that didn't stop them from using his holes until they were sated. he wouldn't mind.



							Yan's first two loads had just been to get the edge off, before he really got to work milking out the silty, clotted sludge that'd built up inside him during the {five days} away. {smith}'s guts, as always, made a very accommodating hole. hole slack in unconsciousness, his guts still rippled along his tentacle-cock, milking out heavy squirts of thicker-and-thicker ooze. Yan moaned into the muscles of his back as he felt aching, rubbery pellets of congealed murk peel off the inner walls of his balls, forming bulging clots through his inner passages, until they erupted up his cock in sharp pulses and splattered onto the walls of {smith}'s guts. they stuck there in grimy clumps until his continual thrusting dislodged them, churning them up and dissolving them back into the dense, tarry slurry that clogged his guts



							by the time Yan was mostly drained, {smith}'s loose gape hardly resisted his knot at all. it sunk between his cheeks to pop into his flooded guts with a _squelch_, only for Yan to tug it free with a _pop_, splattering hot ropes of tarry cum all across his glazed asscheeks. his puffy asslips wetly kissed the root of his shaft, pulsing as they stretched wider to take his knot again, over and over as Yan messily knotfucked him, until he slammed down to the root and unloaded inside him for the sixth-or-seventh time. {smith}'s gut rippled and warped, loudly gurgling, as he took yet another load inside. Yan's final load was thick and clumpy, all the sloppy ichor already wrung out of him, leaving only the thick, paste-like dregs.

							he collapsed across {smith}'s back panting, flushed and sweating, letting his aching knot try to wedge itself into {smith}'s broken hole. black cum constantly oozed out around in, glazing his bruised asslips in inky sludge.




		--- [CHAPTER 3 BREAK HEREISH]




		{smith} might have squirmed in the night, half-awake and still impaled on his knot, and that might have lead to Yan lazily tentacle-fucking him in his sleep. Their bodies were still joined, with the long, unspooled length of his cock looping through {smith}'s cum-bloated guts. His cock erupted inside him, his shuddering walls coaxing out another load that gushed in and splattered out of his overstuffed body, just adding to the mess between them.

		in the morning, his guts were still loosely stoppered by the turgid swell of Yan's knot. Neru's cock draped across his thigh, weakly squirming as he huffed in his sleep, mindlessly questing to sink into an available hole. it had sufficed for the still-slimy press of their bodies, oozing up across {smith}'s ass to squirm against Yan's hip. squirts of fresh black goo erupted out across Yan's thighs as they shifted in their sleep, slowly waking.

		{smith} grumbled as he pulled out; the slow seep of crusted black ooze turned into the heavier _glug_ of a barrel being emptied. he sleepily raised a hand, grinding the back of his hand against his eyes to rub off the sleep sand, and mostly just scraped along his cheek with a thick clot of murky scum that had dried across his hand.

		"you always leave me the cleanup," he complained, not unfriendly. the room perpetually held the evidence of their mating: black streaks down his {bedframe}, becoming splotches and blobs of black on the wood slats beneath. {smith} cleaned, certainly, but it would take an enormous amount of scrubbing to get the stain off wood. Not much point, when they'd be back again in a few days to make another mess.

		Yan pulled a fresh set of clothes on. he had spares at {smith}'s place, for precisely this kind of situation.

		Yan cupped the fabric of his loincloth around his still-unsheathed dick and tugged it tight, into a swollen pouch. the dry fabric against his still-slimy cock stung. the excess fabric draped down in front as a breechcloth, forming a tassel that hung to his knees. he wore black already, anyway, so at least he didn't have to worry about stains showing.

		he pulled on a pair of heavier leggings over his legs. training gear. his travel- and cum- stained clothes, he rolled up in a bundle for later laundering.

		"master {trainer} will be pissed if i'm late." he'd already be pissed they hadn't checked up with him in the night, when they arrived.

		"mm," {smith} hummed, not buying it. "and you just missed my company so much."

		Yan traced his fingers up the back of {smith}'s thigh, feeling over hairy skin soaked down in silty clumps of dried cum. "i missed _something_, sure," he said, teasingly, fingertip gliding over his puffy, protruding asslips, and {smith} let out an mock-aggrieved huff.

		---



the training grounds were on the inner edge of the {worker's spiral}, right where it diverged from the {housing spiral}. it was a grander building, several stories tall: the first from daubed clay, the rest wood and paper, with a shallowly-pitched tile roof. it branched out into wide fingers of halls and courtyards; the entire complex was one of the biggest constructions in the village.

Yan passed by several people he knew: other guardians and hunters-in-training. the central public hall was mostly for showing off to the public, although students who stuck to training there got a reputation for being big-headed. each teacher had their own foibles, and their techniques generally required specific training grounds, to limit the damage they could cause. lighter work, flashier work, that was what was suitable for the central hall.

{spearman} was there. he was brutally attractive. he was stripped down to a pair of loose silk pants: material tight bound to his waist, then loose and flowing across his crotch and thighs, and cinched tight again at his calves. his skin was shiny with sweat. he was training with the {nagamaki}, a shorter polearm with a curved blade roughly as long as the haft. each swirling motion snapped the loose fabric of his pants tight to his thighs for a moment, before he shifted, sliding in and out of different guards and sweeps in explosive motions. his shaggy dreadlocks, rusty dark red, shot out behind him like a meteor's tail. the beads woven into his hair clacked and chimed with each motion. his bare feet beat a tattoo on the packed dirt of the training ground, complex footwork closer to a dance.

he trained using a _very_ showy combat style. much more dramatic than Yan's more functional brawling-and-stabbing, but {spearman} had aspirations of being a 'true' cultivator: poised, elegant, flashy, fast as a whirlwind and sharp as glass. noble in countenance and perfect in bearing. Yan desperately wanted to see if that elegance held up while he was split wide on a fat knot.

{spearman} finished a {kata} and came to a resting pose: arms still outstretched, but blade kept level, in the final pose of a thrust. his shoulders rose and fell with his heavy breathing; he could hear his panting from across the {training ground}. the muscles of his back rippled, shining with sweat. his dreads stuck to his back in a messy fan, and he finally broke his form to lower the blade, one-handed, while he used the other to scrape his dreads off his sweaty back and over one shoulder. Yan looked away before he turned and he had to see his dumb stupid handsome face.

Yan made his way down the hall, to the patios and balconies leading to the more secluded courtyard he met with {trainer} in.

somewhat unfortunately, {trainer} was already there. he was sat in a full lotus in the middle of the raked gravel sparring ground, eyes closed, still and silent to outside observation. he was nearly as tall sitting as Yan was standing, and his horns added another {foot} of height above that. he was bare save for a roughly-spun wrap knotted at his hip, extending to his knees.

"ah," he said, mouth moving, no other change in his still form. "my wandering student deigns to appear before me."

"hail," Yan said, kneeling before him.

{trainer} was an immense minotaur. he loomed head-and-shoulders over most everyone in the village; even Yan, who was fairly tall, only came up to mid-chest. his hooves were as broad as serving-plates; his horns were pale and gleaming. his muscles were enormous. they strained the limits of what even a minotaur could achieve. his coarse fur thinned across his front, revealing the dark skin beneath, and grew thicker and thicker down his arms and legs, up his neck and across his back. the brown fur was striated with steely grey: only flecks across his arms and legs, but covering most of his head in stark grey, light against his skin.

originally from the beastman {mesa}-warrens deeper in the forest, he'd settled down in Takire long before Yan had been born. a mercenary-cultivator who'd sought more peaceable lands.

he'd been the strongest in the village, before his injury. a beast from the deep woods had ranged from its native lands and attacked the village, and it was with a steep cost that they'd pushed it away. {trainer} had been nearly clawed in two, and his body still carried the signs: massive scars raked diagonally across his side, left side to right hip, with a matched gouge deep in the meat of his right outer thigh. it had healed, but not well, and any further treatment was beyond the resources of the village. he favored his left leg heavily.

he'd unblocked nearly half his meridians, which was close to the most of anyone in the entire village, and he'd done it early. after his injury, he'd fallen by the wayside: a rising power, cruelly cut down at his prime. but even now he was still more than a match for anyone else on the hunter {team}. he'd opened the meridian along all four of his stomachs first, giving him an incredible advantage in his qi uptake, and then aimed for a balanced unblocking of his meridians: a loop in each arm, each leg, down his spine and across his horns. he'd opened the connections between all of them, beginning work on his secondary channels, forsaking focused power for a more generalist approach, allowing him to use an incredible breadth of techniques, all as suited his specific needs.

in Yan, his middle and lower dantian both were little more than particularly resonant nodes along his spine meridian. raw essence collected between his hips, in his lower dantian, and was internally smelted into qi. qi flowed up along his spine meridian to collect by his heart, in his middle dantian, where it was dispersed throughout his body.

his upper dantian, between his eyes, was comparatively undeveloped; if he opened the correct meridians, he could use his middle dantian to smelt qi into a yet more rarefied substance, and it would collect within his upper dantian: all three internal furnaces, performing their duties. that was currently beyond him, and would likely remain beyond him for some time. he was focused on more brute techniques than that.

as he unblocked more meridians, and all their twisting passages met up, they would all grow and grow: both smelting qi faster and storing more, and in increasing volumes as they grew. as it was, Yan was capable of bursts of great power, but only until the qi permeating his muscles was depleted, and then it took time for his shriveled dantian and still-clogged channels to saturate his body again. {trainer} could store enough qi to fight, unsleeping, for days.

"Hm!" {trainer}'s eyes opened into slits, and he unfolded himself, huge thigh contracting to push himself upright onto his enormous hooves. he crossed his arms over his chest and scowled down at Yan. "so, what do you have to say for yourself, boy? too busy going around town, fucking anybody who'll have you, than to attend to your _actual_ master, eh?"

Yan scoffed. "Hail, honored teacher," he said flatly. "We dropped supply caches at the fifth, twelfth, and thirty-second support bases. {something about checking flora & fauna for void corruption?} We located a mated pair of poisonbloom jaguars on the outward travel, and returned on the way back. Both were killed, and we delivered one corpse to {butcher}. We traveled quickly back; there was a voidstorm a day downriver that seemed like it might turn."

{trainer} snorted. "One day, that attitude of yours will get you into real trouble."

"certainly not from you, master," Yan said. {trainer} snorted again. he held the least on ceremony of all the martial masters in the village. which wasn't to say that he wasn't strict, just that he was strict on effort and performance, not respectful language.

"where is that hound of yours, anyway?"

Yan shrugged. "off fucking anybody who'll have him," he said, lips peeled into a sidelong grin.

"ha!" {trainer} barked, laugh making up for what it lacked in authenticity with volume.

"well," he stated. "you'd had {a week} of fun and relaxation, playing hunter out in the forest. time for you to apply yourself, for once. crane stance," he said, and Yan obligingly stood. he pulled his daggers from their sheaths on his thighs, weight balanced neatly beneath him.

{trainer} took a step back and flung one hand out to the side. a weapon manifest in his hand with a sound like rock grinding against rock: an immense stone hammer axe, looking like it was carved from red-veined basalt. "let's see if you've kept up on your martial forms," he said, a mean grin on his face. "let me see how you've advanced {w/e specific martial art}."

Yan got the absolute shit beaten out of him for the next {three hours}.

crane stance was a style focused on sweeping motions, evasion, and light steps, and provided a strong defensive base. it favored poses that aligned many arm and torso meridians for use channeling wood qi. {trainer} was countering it with bull stance: a form devoted to pure physical power, coarsely-aligned with metal qi. Yan was nearly gored a half-dozen times, and it was only {trainer}'s unwillingness to _actually_ impale his student that left him with a series of messy bruises and cuts along his chest and side, and not several holes punched straight through him.

Yan was better suited to viper stance: swift and sharp, moving under the enemy's guard and leaving behind poisoned bites before they could react. he could actually use its water qi stances, though he wasn't able to maintain them for long enough to use its {water-walking step} technique. crane stance was educational, but it was half just an excuse for {trainer} to beat him down. {trainer} could kick Yan's ass any way he wanted without any meaningful resistance; he didn't really need any excuses.

the sun finished rising, and the shaded courtyard was cast into direct sunlight as the shadows sunk towards the walls. heat beat down on them. sweat poured down his sides, stinging when they met the sluggishly-bleeding wounds down his side, scraped across his back. droplets dripped beneath him, dotting the sand beneath.

Yan would like to say he did well enough, facing a cultivator twelve times his strength. he got up after getting knocked down; that was the best he could hope for. once, he was able to maneuver around a blocked strike for a follow-up in a way that {trainer} was only able to partially block; his blades scraped uselessly off {trainer}'s iron skin.

Yan was pouring with sweat, breath burning hot in his lungs. his posture faltered.

"What!" {trainer} roared, brandishing his axe. "All that training, and you can't even defeat a cripple?!" He leapt forward, sending a halo of hot sand spraying out in all directions, hoof leaving behind a pitted crater. Yan just barely managed to lurch backwards out of range of the strike, and the meteor-impact of the blow smashing to the ground still sent him tumbling backwards, ears ringing.

there was no follow-up strike as he lay, panting and exhausted, on the gravel margin; that was how he knew the bout was over.

-- if there's another [CHAPTER BREAK] it would be hereish

there was the crunch of hooves on gravel, and the shadow of {trainer} cast itself across his face, blocking the sun. Yan was a dripping wreck, and he felt some pride at seeing {trainer} above him: breathing hard after their spar, body glistening with sweat. at least he'd put up enough of a fight to give him a slight workout.

"adequate," he said, eventually. "but you should be doing better."

Yan managed to shove himself to his knees, arms wobbly. "whose fault is that?!" he was a little intemperate, after getting the shit kicked out of him for {three hours}.

{trainer} exhaled sharply, overheated breath spilling from his nose as gouts of steaming air. "yours," he said, flatly. then: "attend to me."

his wrap was saturated with sweat, soaked translucent. his dark fur showed clearly through the sodden fabric. he tugged at the knot at his hip and the whole thing came loose and dropped with a heavy _thump_ to the ground beneath. beneath that, his loincloth was just as soaked, pouch enormous and drawn tight. he sunk one finger along the side of the pouch and hooked it to the side; the motion pulled his whole waistcloth loose. the wrapped cord sagged down his hip before the whole thing fell to the ground with a heavier _splat_, letting his sheath and balls spill out.

Yan slumped forward, wobbling arms barely keeping him propped upright. the movement brought him face-to-face with {trainer}'s swollen sheath: thick, dark leathery flesh in a fat tube as broad as one of Yan's biceps, with a thin coating of greyish fur all up its length. it stirred minutely as Yan's gasping breaths spilled across his length.

his balls hung beneath, oblong and heavy. his sac was bigger than Yan's head, and it hung down to his knees, spilling over his muscular thighs in a heavy drape, huge and obscene. the clawmark-scars cut a scant inch above the root of his sheath, leaving behind a broad stripe of pale, hairless flesh over the arch of his {abdominals} and across his coarsely-haired haunches.

every time Yan sucked his cock, he thought about if the beast had struck just a fraction lower, he never would've had the opportunity to suck on such a perfect cock.

"yes, master," Yan said, voice a rough rasp. hot drool pooled at the back of his throat. {trainer}'s scent was rich in the air, heavy and virile, and this close, so intense that it burned in his mouth, adding an acrid tang to his spit.

he sunk forward. both his hands curled across the huge, heavy drape of {trainer}'s sheath. his fingers were instantly soaked from the dripping sweat. it was bicep-thick, huge and fat even on {trainer}'s enormous body, and as his cock started to swell within it became even fatter. he pressed his face to the crook of his thigh and inhaled deeply. the hot spice seared through his brain, sending a rush of heat billowing through his entire body. {trainer}'s heavy balls shuddered against his shoulder, cocktip peeking from his sheath to gush messy streamers of pre all down his back, burning in his wounds just as fiercely as the sweat had. Yan lapped across his sheath, face dripping with fresh sweat, still cascading down {trainer}'s chest to spatter over Yan's head.

his cock shuddered, spilling out from his sheath in a long, heavy arch. the slimy sheathfluid coating his shaft was thinned by the pouring of sweat, dripping down the underside of his shaft and coating Yan's heaving chest in an oily, slimy glaze of raw, rank minotaur preseed. His cock was mottled: a bright, pearly pink at the tip that mottled in oblong splotches to a darker, duskier purple halfway down his shaft. Now, only half of it was unsheathed, purple tone only just becoming dominant, and the huge thing spilled over his shoulder and down his back.

Yan gasped for breath, chest still heaving from exertion. The rich musk pouring off {trainer}'s body only drove his body hotter. His cock ached, squirming in his sheath, and it peeled out into the open, looping around his loincloth to tear it off all by itself. it spilled out between his thighs, a questing tongue licking across his skin, as he coiled both hands around {trainer}'s immense, bestial cock and begin stroking. the wet, sloppy sound of it filled the courtyard. froth built up across Yan's fingers, oozing down his wrists in foaming globs.

{trainer} let out a wry, wheezing laugh. his elongated foot nudged against Yan's sheath, grinding up against his balls. "too eager. like always. what have i said? You ain't getting to use that worm of yours until you beat me in a fight," One huge hand curled over the back of Yan's head and tipped it up, smearing his face across {trainer}'s dripping shaft, coating him in sheets of runny ooze. "stop jerking yourself off and attend to _me._"

his cock shuddered in front of Yan as he drew it back, until the very tip pulsed and flared, spitting out a fountaining spray of fresh pre all across his face. runny, cloudy off-white bull preseed poured down Yan's front, coating him in murky lines. The very tip of his cock bulged fatter in an animal cockhead, a messy swell of gristled flesh that fanned out wider in dense furls, completely unlike a human cock. Yan just opened wide, tongue curling around the animal gnarls of {trainer}'s cocktip, and guided it into his mouth. It was fat, broader than a fist, and it immediately warped his lips wide, dragging them out from his face in an obscene pout. the gristled tip dug into his teeth, straining his jaw.

anyone without the body reinforcement Yan had gone through would've been split open, torn apart, just by the heavy _thud_ of {trainer}'s bulldick ramming against the back of his mouth. as it was, Yan just relaxed his jaw, feeling his muscles stretch, and blindly gulped down syrupy strings of sloppy bull pre. one gulp, two, before his throat was lubed enough for him to sink down further, jaw spasming as it dislocated, and {trainer}'s fat cockhead shoved its way down his throat.

{trainer} groaned out his appreciation above, both hands curling around Yan's head. his fingers overlapped across his scalp; each hand, when balled into a fist, was nearly the size of his entire head. he'd said Yan would need more work in bodily-reinforcement techniques before he was ready to take his fist in his ass or down his throat. Just the thought of that was enough to make Yan's cock pulse, squirting out a messy streamer of cloudy black pre across {trainer}'s hoof. he was a little too sunk into it, thoughts stilled by the throbbing cock sheathed in his throat, for that to break him out of it. he leaned forward, tipping his head back to align his throat with his body, turning himself into a straight-shot from mouth to stomach, a slick, open passage for {trainer} to slake his lusts with.

his fingers curled around Yan's head with enough pressure to crack many people's skulls. he tugged him forward, plunging his cock into Yan's throat. his cockhead pushed through the spasming clench of his throat, and he rutted back and forth at first, easing him open. each thrust pulled back with an eruption of thick, stringy throat-slime that squirted from Yan's nose and mouth and coated the length of his shaft in murky opaque froth.

his cockhead hammered first against the opening to his stomach, a hard knot of spasming muscle, and then punched through with a dizzying, blossoming heat, like the initial burst of sensation when being hit hard in the stomach, before the pain hit. here, the pain was just heat, a cramping pressure, as enough preseed to fill a jug gushed into his stomach in moments. his body squelched and gurgled, stomach churning around {trainer}'s monstrous cock, organ warped and stretched out as he rutted ungently into Yan's body.

Then, his cock stabbed even deeper, slopping along the walls of his stomach until it hit the opening to his guts. only then, breaching through that second barrier, could {trainer} mash Yan's face against his sweaty sheath, the full length of his cock sunk into him from mouth nearly down to his hips. the bulge of his cockhead pushed out beneath his ribs, gushing his heavy, bullish issue straight into his guts.

{trainer} stayed there for a long moment, enjoying the way Yan's body rippled around his shaft, before he tugged back. the gnarl of his cockhead wrenched at his guts, splaying his stomach open wide. thick, sloppy liquid heavily _glugged_ inside him as his preseed-bloated stomach emptied out, only to repeat again when his cockhead yanked back out of his stomach with a sickening wet _squelch_, muted by the flesh of Yan's body. {trainer} eased back and forth, fucking his stomach until his muscles were slack and open. he enjoyed the clench and pressure of working a body open around his cock. pre spewed from his cocktip, what would've been cheek-bulging mouthfuls of oily, fragrant preseed squirting straight into his guts, into his bulging stomach and fucked deeper.

{trainer} picked up the pace. all Yan could do was take it, let his body be used as a breeding post. he was on his knees, body dragged forward, off-balance, held up more by the fat spear of {trainer}'s cock inside him than his own muscles.

{trainer} hunched forward, the scarred muscles in his right thigh spasming. he held Yan's face in both hands and drove him down, forcing the full length of his bull dick straight down Yan's throat. his low-hanging balls swung forward and smacked him right in the chest, splattering him with rich sweat, reeking of bull musk.

{trainer} groaned, loud, as he used Yan, bouncing his disheveled face onto his sheath again and again, bellowing with each sloppy _squelch_ from Yan's fucked-open throat and the heavier, gut-wrenching gurgles from his abused stomach. churned-up ooze squirted up his throat, splattering from his nose and mouth in creamy globs and coating his entire face in a layer of slimy froth.

{trainer} came with a roar. his cock rippled and surged all down along the line of his swollen throat, straining the spread-wide passages of his stomach until they burned. his load gushed straight into his guts, audibly sloshing with each hefty, virile spurt.

Yan gurgled, eyes squeezed shut tight, nose clogged with rich bull-sweat and cum. he blindly humped {trainer}'s hoof, cock twisted up into an immense lumpy knot, rasping against {trainer}'s coarse fur. he came with a whine, knot beating uselessly against his fetlocks, and shot messy streamers of black cum up {trainer}'s calf, splattering back against his stomach and chest in hot freckles.

{trainer} didn't stop there. his orgasm ebbed, the heavy spasms down his cock stilling, but he still lazily dragged Yan's head up and down his cock, enjoying the sloppy slide of his cum-clogged body around his cock. thicker globs of cum worked their way up Yan's throat, pouring in creamy clots from his wrecked mouth, and it was only once {trainer} got tired of seeing a fresh wash of his cloudy, foaming issue gurgle up from Yan's ruined throat that he released his grip and let Yan collapse beneath him, cock wrenching itself free from his body in a brutal yank. Yan immediately heaved and vomited into the gravel, wetly retching up {gallons} of bullcum from his fucked-open stomach.

meanwhile, {trainer} looked down at the mess of black ichor drooling down his calf. he snorted in amusement. "i said, boy, you ain't gonna paint me in your fucked-up worm slime." he didn't sound that exasperated. he kicked Yan in the chest with his stained hoof, knocking him flat on his back, and planted the hoof right on his chest, hard enough that his ribs ached. his split hooftips dug into Yan's neck. "clean it," he demanded.

Yan's face was already a mess of cum, clinging to him in syrupy lines. He leaned in, nose clogged with {trainer}'s rich issue, the spit pooling in his mouth half soupy bullcum. {trainer}'s cock drooled the sludgy dregs of his load across Yan's scalp as he got to work. his tongue dragged wet stripes across his hoof, lapping up his murky, sour-and-metal cum until the nail shone glossy.

Every time he tried to swallow he ended up gagging, brutalized throat raw and burning, and messily spat up a mess of cum all over {trainer}'s hoof. The point of this wasn't to _actually_ clean his hoof.

{trainer} eased up, letting Yan crawl before him, tongue carding through the coarse hair of his foot, matted down in a grimy mess of sweat-thinned cum.

by the time Yan had reached his thigh, {trainer} was hard again. he leisurely jerked himself off while Yan lapped across his hairy, sweat-dripping balls, and let his cock drape over Yan's shoulder, painting his back in rippling cords of watery preseed. he huffed in pleasure as Yan worshiped his body, licking him clean, coating him in a slimy mess of his own issue, and when Yan finally sat back, face a mess of froth, {trainer} aimed his cock right at him and unleashed his second load, painting messy stripes of silty bullcum all up and down his front. Yan leaned in, lips curling around the gnarled lip, and messily gulped down the next spurts. {trainer} groaned low and hauled him forward, sheathing his cock back down his throat, and laughed as Yan gagged and vomited up frothy messes of bullcum against his sheath.

it took a while before {trainer} was finished stroking Yan along his cock. he shallowly rutted against his front, cockhead thudding against his guts, and groaned with each wet spill of cum that gurgled up Yan's throat to squirt in frothy lines from his nose and mouth.

afterwards:

"hm," {trainer} said as he settled back in a sitting position, left knee raised, wrist balanced on top. his sheath drooped across his right thigh, half-unsheathed cock still oozing a gleaming thread of silvery fluid. "now that we've got the preliminaries out of the way, we can attend to your actual studies." his cock rippled, spurting out a fatter slug of fresh preseed. he was still naked, body glazed now not just in fresh sweat but a layer of drying, crusting cum. he was doing it on purpose; he'd cuff Yan in the side of the head if he thought he wasn't taking his cultivation seriously enough. but he'd do it after Yan would've gotten to suck his cock for a third time, so maybe that would be worth it. his mouth was thick with the rich, almost grassy taste of bullcum.

Yan's voice, when he spoke, was rough. Deeper than usual, cracking wetly. If {trainer} had wanted a useful conversation, he should've had one before throatfucking him twice. "I'm close to clearing all the way up to my middle dantian," he said. "we were planning to take a break from missions and sit around cultivating in the dark for a few days." Neru was also close to clearing his {whatever} meridian; they'd specifically agreed to try similar-length meridians, for fairnesses sake.

"hmph", {trainer} said, crossing his arms. "i'll allow it. it's about time you finished that second meridian of yours, anyway." he jerked his head to the side, horns making a scything arc through the air. "stop by the {alchemist's} and tell them i've cleared you for two bluefire meridian-cleansing pills."

{something about his alchemist/pharmacy runs always being awkward. he tried to keep things as professional as possible. asking {trainer} for his statement in writing would probably be overdoing it.}

Yan kowtowed, forehead pressed to the gravel. his guts, still bloated with minotaur cum, bulged out against his thighs. "yes, master." supplements had been scarce for him. not from lack of interest. his qi affinity conflicted with most of their usual supplements, and after some particularly bad responses to the common five-purities pills he had mostly had to make do with natural qi from spirit springs. it was unfortunate, but until they happened to find or cultivate some void-aligned spirit mushrooms he was stuck unassisted. bluefire pills were unaligned, and particularly intense -- the impurities burnt out of the meridians as living fire, rather than the usual black ooze -- which made them a better fit for him than most, but also a rare treasure, fiercely desired by everyone else training in the village.

Yan wasn't {trainer}'s only student, though he was probably the one he fucked the most. there wasn't much favoritism for that; {trainer} could find an eager hole in just about anyone he asked. he was a {war hero}, after all. Yan was just particularly eager for it. And, {trainer} had said to the other instructors, he had unique potential; it was worth it to give him what supplements he could use. every teacher said that about their own students, but Yan did sometimes get the pills.

"but first," {trainer} added. "60 laps around the village walls. no fancy shadow magic. wouldn't want you slacking off."

Yan groaned, and {trainer} laughed again, more genuine this time.




--- [CHAPTER 4ISH BREAK HERE]


the village, in the {decades/centuries} it had existed, had reached a kind of balance with the forest around it. trees had been cleared in many places for fields along the river, and for most of a day's travel all around the forest had been cropped and maintained. useful plants had been spread, and obnoxious ones curtailed. thick brambles had been channeled into waving fans, better to harvest their succulent berries. shrines to forest spirits dotted the trails, and glimmering tokens were left hanging in the trees. but there was no true peace with the forest.

beast fought beast and glutted on the spoils of their kills. pests swarmed without end. there were the friendlier creatures -- bees in their hives, birds that would guide hunters to their prey for a measure of their kills -- but they were all creatures of the forest. servants of the forest god. there was a hunger there, and those who forgot paid the price. it was a fantasy that a glimmering token of beaten copper could stay the hand of a vengeful spirit, but it was a fantasy that was very dear to most. many in the village would not approve of Yan's blasphemy, but it wasn't as if he _desecrated_ the shrines. he hadn't had any good experiences with forest spirits. the kind ones did not seek him out. call it a family curse.

there was a beaten path around the village walls. Yan ran from the {northern} exit, by the fields, up along the hill where the forest was scarcely twenty paces from the palisade, around to the hive-tenders' hives, then out a little to the bridge that spanned the river downstream of the village, past the {southern} gate, and out to the dry-season fields, fallow now. past that, the route looped back along the fields, over the river again, to the broad clearing and the flooded paddies. and then around again, and again, and again. he counted each loop past the {northern} gate. Takire wasn't a large village, but neither was it small. the lodgings, workplaces, and vegetable gardens for nearly a thousand people took up an appreciable amount of space. it was a long run.

{farmer} was there in the paddies weeding, sunk to mid-thigh. his thighs were shining, frosted in glistening droplets from the sluggishly-rippling water. he spotted Yan on his second go-round, and waved. it was hardly the first time he'd seen Yan work himself into a sweaty heap running around the village. {trainer} wasn't that inventive in his methods.

{farmer} worked in the fields outside the walls, naked save for a belted satchel slung low on his hips and a beaten-copper mask on his face: the visage of a snarling lion. he said it was {enchanted} to drive off any low-grade beasts that came too close to the walls, although {farmer} wore it nearly everywhere out of habit.

he was superstitious, that one.

he said the forest spoke to those who listened, and regardless of what others said he kept to what the forest told him. his family had tried to exorcise him twice as a kid. he moved out to live in the gardener's compound at twelve summers. it had been the scandalous gossip all around the village for years. {they still weren't speaking; Yan had needed to loom supportively behind him more than a few times when one or another of his cousins got too exuberant about mending the familial connection.}

"i have something to show you, when you're done!" {farmer} called, when the beaten-dirt path around the palisade came particularly close to the paddies. Yan just waved to show he'd heard. he still had a lot of running to do.

{farmer} had been trying, unsuccessfully, to grow rare herbs near the village. he'd come up with a few formations that helped, or at least stopped some {magical} plants from withering away quite so fast. some more common herbs flourished in the right place, and {farmer} knew well their properties and needs, and tended them well. the forest around the village was their garden, tended almost as thoroughly as the paddies in the fields. but some plants needed a thickness of qi that only the wilds could yield.

{farmer} sought out some measure of peace with the forest: tending to the trees, to the plants and herbs regardless of their use. but though he heeded the words of the forest, {farmer} did not trust it. there were always wild beasts, and all the harmony would not serve them well if beasts glutted on their harvests and laid siege to their walls. hence, his plant cultivation. he would wrench the secrets of the grove from the forest, and turn them to the aid of the village.

after the run -- and after Yan had dove, fully-clothed, into a paddy to rinse off the sweat and lingering bullcum -- {farmer} took him to one of his garden plots, an imitation cave dug into the side of a hill. it was a little ways beyond the forest's edge. just downstream of the village, just-so visible from the river path as some wooden beams framing a ramshackle door in the hillside, surrounded by boxy planters and coarse ceramic jugs. a stone carved in the image of {farmer}'s {tutelary spirit} sat before it, and creepily, there were rows of more statues inside, dark eyes gleaming.

Yan had only just stepped into the low, dim {dugout} when {farmer} shoved him to the side. his hands, hot from the sun, curled around his biceps as he pushed him against the wall, and he rose up on his tip-toes, mask already shoved askew, to press a hungry kiss against his jaw.

"the mushrooms have been doing well," {farmer} said, voice low and sultry against Yan's ear. his hands stroked down his sides, still dripping with water, to curl eagerly around the fattening mound of his sheath.

	{farmer} was well and truly sun-bleached. the rough stubble across his jaw shone golden when it caught the dim light filtering inside, making it all the brighter. the lion-mask really did suit him. he dragged his lips up Yan's jaw, biting lightly, until he captured his lips, tongue flitting against his lips before he aggressively shoved it inside.

	Yan dragged a hand up {farmer}'s bare chest, fingers sliding over his lean muscles. his pebbled nipple ground against his palm, and {farmer} huffed into his mouth at the touch, pressing their bodies tighter together.

	Yan's cock shuddered, sheath pulsing between them, and {farmer} didn't lose any time; his hand, cupped against his swelling bulge, twisted under his breechcloth to cup the cum-stained fabric of his {fundoshi}. he tugged the pouch to the side, letting his sheath spill out into his hand. {farmer} kissed him hungrily, one hand eagerly jerking his unsheathing length off. his voidhound cock was wrist thick even at the tapering tip, and down its length it grew slightly but distinctly fatter, until it reached nearly forearm-thick at the ripe-melon swell of his turgid knot. it was a point of pique that {farmer} hadn't managed to ever take it. sure, {smith} could, but {smith} was big; {farmer} was shorter, leaner. he took it as a challenge, but Yan had needed to pull him off more than once to keep himself from suffocating himself on a knot nearly half the size of his entire head.

	{farmer}'s technique had a certain similarity to milking a goat. his strokes were firm and efficient. certainly not unpleasant. Yan humped into his hand, thrusts growing slicker and sloppier as his pre gushed down his length. more cock unspooled from inside him, pushing out and curling up {farmer}'s forearm in a grasping coil.

	his sheath tentacles peeked out into the open, coiling loosely around his wrist and forearm, painting his deeply-tanned sink with ink-black strokes. Yan's cock matched his other tentacles, coiling in sloppy loops up his arm, until {farmer} wasn't so much stroking him off as pumping his arm through the pulsing spiral of his twisted-up length. sloppy cords of inky preseed poured down his arm to drip in fat globs onto the uneven beaten-dirt floor beneath.

	"let me get the jug," {farmer} moaned against his lips. his feet kicked to the side, hooking around a chipped clay jug, rim green-brown with glaze, and dragged it over the dirt with a dull clattering. he coaxed Yan's shaft down into a messy lump, tangled all down his forearm, with the tip squirting straight down into the jug.

	milked for alchemical reagents. there were worse ways to spend the time. {farmer} groaned when his knot lurched out into the open, turgid but still bulky, and he dropped to his knees in front of him, both hands curling around the enormous, pulsing mass of his swelling knot. his writhing cock squirmed across his chest, painting him in inky lines, and pissed out a constant stream of cloudy black ichor into the awaiting jug. dark-associated qi of his caliber was scarce to find, and rarely as stable. and most men, even most cultivators were hardly as... voluminous in their emissions as he and Neru were.

	it wasn't all just resource collection.

	{farmer}'s mouth lapped across the bulk of his knot, tongue digging into the deep grooves along the edge. hot breath spilled from his mouth, and the dugout filled with the sound of his sloppy sucking, even over the continual burble of his load gushing out into the awaiting jug. {farmer}'s cock was a hard line digging into Yan's calf, leaving behind messy smears of pre. Yan wasn't the only one humping people's legs like a dog.

	he'd been away for {five days}, which meant the old stains of his loads had faded to dull purple lines across {farmer}'s skin: hardly visible in the sun, and completely hidden in the shaded {dugout}. it was the thought of the dark, shining lines painted across {farmer}'s front, looping around his neck, getting to make fresh marks, visible to everyone, that brought him off. Yan came with a moan, knot throbbing between {farmer}'s splayed hands, and the hollow splatter of his preseed turned into a gushing pour as he pissed out inky voidcum in a churning waterfall. {farmer} squeezed around his knot the whole time, breath hot, tongue bright pink lapping out to catch messy runnels of clotted sheathslime oozing over his bulky knot.

	Yan didn't quite fill up the jug. {farmer} had made them to take his loads, after all. the layers of his load slowly separated: thicker must settled to the bottom in silty drifts, as cloudy black ooze rose to the surface, topped with a layer of oily froth. all rich with different gradations of void qi, and all useful fertilizer for {farmer}'s various experiments.

	still, one load wouldn't be enough. he was still pent up from not getting to properly cum with {trainer}. the continual gush of his rippling cock slowed into a few final pulses, before his cock went slack, letting the dregs drain out in fuming globs.

	{farmer} shifted his grip, but before he could properly release him Yan bowled him forward, pinning {farmer} beneath him in a wrestling hold. his cock looped around his thigh, tip lapping back behind his balls to wriggle along the trench of his ass.

	"do you have another jug for my next load," Yan asked into his ear, low and rough, "or should i deliver it directly to you?"

	his cocktip pulsed against {farmer}'s hole, gushing messy runnels of pre that oozed out over his cheeks and splattered to the dirt below. {farmer} squirmed, hips rolling against him, legs hooking around his waist to drag him closer. Yan let out a pleased hum, cocktip a fat tongue lapping against {farmer}'s raised asshole. he was already open; he'd spent some time working himself loose, while Yan had been running. he was still very tight.

	{farmer}'s hole shuddered, pulsing and pushing, when Yan eased his cocktip deeper, like a mouth pursing its lips. Yan groaned, cock lurching forward, folding over itself into a messy squiggle across his asscheeks as he breached him open. the tip alone was still brutally fat compared to most human dicks; {farmer} clenched and relaxed, clenched and relaxed, hole milking his tip. his next gush of pre erupted inside him, flooding his ass and pouring back out in a frothy mess, and the added slickness made it easy for his cock to sink deeper into {farmer}'s hot, tight depths.

	Yan hunched forward, heavy balls smacking against {farmer}'s upturned ass while his cock squirmed up along his cheeks in messy loops. he slowly fed more of it inside him. he could take the whole thing. having a prehensile tentacle-cock helped a lot. he felt the twist at the end of his ass, aiming for the target, and it was easy to hit it, push past, and sink himself up into {farmer}'s guts proper.

	{farmer} groaned beneath him, mouth open wide, breath fast. his body shuddered around him, spread hole clenching against each heavy gush of slobbery black pre that gushed into him.

	Yan leaned in, catching {farmer}'s breath across his face, and bowed down, teeth scraping along his stubbled jaw. he panted messily across his throat, groaning at the flutter of his heartbeat just under the surface. he opened wide, teeth latching into place. his fangs pressed against {farmer}'s throat -- not hard enough to pierce the skin, just enough to feel his pulse more solidly. each beat surged through his jaw. he rumbled again, sound like a snarl, wet and hungry against {farmer}'s throat. his cock shuddered, squirming inside him, and he stabbed deep, sloppily fucking him with the stiffened root of his cock, while the tip squirmed wetly inside him, questing deeper. his stomach writhed, guts squirming like snakes as Yan's cock coiled and twisted, wrenching them out of place.

	his knot ground against {farmer}'s asscheeks, sheath-tentacles a dozen slimy tongues licking across his ass, digging into his muscular flesh. his asshole, swollen out into fat, puffy lips around his pumping shaft, was still nowhere close to taking his knot. he could take a fist, and was close to taking both. after that, they'd maybe try for the whole knot. but here, now, just a quick fuck? Yan pinned his knot against his straining hole, the rest of his cock sunk deep inside him, lashing wildly. he humped against him, a few inches of cock pulling free with a messy eruption of black slime, and then he drove it back in, fucking him with the final few inches of cock, smacking his thickening knot against his bulging asslips again and again.

	each thrust rocked his throat against his teeth, biting deeper, until he felt {farmer}'s breath turn raspy. they both keened, {farmer} snarling just as much as Yan was, voice shaky, moans popping up his throat in bursts.

	Yan's knot ached, throbbing fatter to try in vain to find something to catch on to. It wasn't {farmer}'s first time. He brought his heels down between them and pressed his ankles to his knot, pinning it between his ass and calves. He clenched down and squeezed it tight. his stomach kicked. the writhing bulge of Yan's cock pushed to the surface as a fat squiggle, like an immense parasite shifting, and Yan collapsed on top of him, groaning low, as he erupted, cock spewing out thick, heavy gushes of oily black voidcum inside him.

	his issue gurgled down his shaft to collect in a sloppy reservoir above his knot. {farmer} wasn't truly stoppered up; his knot was wedged between his asscheeks, pulsing against his skin, and that sufficed for the first few spurts. after that, thick runnels of cum wound their way over Yan's knot and seeped out into the open, spilling down his calves in ropy cords. sluggishly, {farmer}'s belly bloated, as Yan's cock writhed within him, squirming through the soupy morass of his own heavy load.

	there was a _clunk_ from the doorway as it swung open. {farmer}'s head swung up, a hint of alarm on his features. it was Neru, unsurprisingly. his tongues lolled over his teeth, drooling, as he shouldered inside. he snuffled showily, lapping at the air: "the scent alone would've taken me to your breeding," he said, voice a hungry snarl, "if your whimpers hadn't been enough."

	Yan huffed out a little laugh, between his whimpers. his initial spurts, each one a sharp and intense pleasure, had evened out into a continual pour as he pissed out cum into {farmer}'s guts. he usually wasn't up to holding any kind of conversation while knotted. "now you show up," he slurred. "hiding to get out of {trainer}'s work?"

	Neru just grinned at him, smug. "{smith} was very accommodating when i crawled back into his bed."

	Yan pissed out his second load into {farmer}'s guts, while Neru unsheathed across his face and let him suckle on the tip. Neru shied back when he got close; he wanted to save his load for his ass. Or maybe he just wanted to paint sloppy lines of preseed all across {farmer}'s front until he was uniformly dyed purple-black.

	{farmer} writhed when Yan finally unstoppered him. Thick _glugs_ sounded as soupy black cum poured from his wrecked ass, but Neru was on him so quickly that hardly any pooled beneath them. his cock plunged inside, a fat, dripping tentacle that stabbed up through the yawning passage Yan had fucked open inside him, and Neru let out a happy, hungry growl above as he sheathed himself in {farmer}'s worn guts.

	Yan helped roll him to the side, aiding his shuddering limbs to get him positioned on all fours. he ended up straddling Yan, with his bloated stomach hanging beneath him, pressed against Yan's front. Better to take pressure from his bloated guts off his organs. And it gave Neru a better position to properly mount him. Yan huffed out a laugh against {farmer}'s lips as he rocked against Neru's thrusts. his copper mask scraped across his face, metal surface slippery now with Neru's slimy pre; there was a squelching, soupy noise as the pre trapped beneath it smeared back and forth against {farmer}'s face.

	Yan's cock, lax, licked along {farmer}'s bloated belly, heavy and hanging off him like he was gravid with a litter of their pups already. he looped his cocktip around {farmer}'s balls, cinching them so his tentacle-cock made a tight cockring around the base of his shaft, his balls straining against it. he tugged at them, enjoying the way {farmer} gasped and whined at the pressure. his cock was half-hard, whatever preseed he was dripping lost in the gushing mess of his and Neru's monstrous issue, splattered in cloudy black ropes all across his thighs and ass.

	Neru's thrusts were sloppy and wet. each thrust fucked a mess of Yan's load out of him in pressurized gushes, splattering down all over Yan's calves. {farmer} shook and whined, whining high in his throat, as he was used for a second time.

	"be a good little bitch and take it all," Neru growled in his ear. his knot thumped heavily against his ass.

	Yan smacked the side of his muzzle. "don't break him."

	{farmer} had taken more. but he wasn't as fortified as {smith} was, so they had to be a little more delicate. no fucking him into unconsciousness. his bloated stomach dug against Yan's front as Neru sunk in deep; he could feel the churn of his tentacle-cock through his flesh.

	{farmer} was a wreck afterwards: breathing ragged, knees splayed, gaped ass continually gurgling out the mingled slurry of both their loads. his asshole was swollen out into a thick bruised ridge, pinned between his cheeks into a puffy cunt. he was slathered in their loads, skin freshly dyed, and Yan idly painted inky whorls across his sides as he gingerly fisted him open, helping him push out sloppy gushes of cum from his bloated guts.

	{farmer}'s flushed forehead was pressed against Neru's chest, mask fully askew, dark eyes closed. his face was painted purple-black in messy splatters everywhere beneath his mask. Neru's gaze stuck on his open, panting mouth for long enough that Yan flicked him across the head again. {farmer} wasn't ready for such hard use. not that he _wouldn't_ look great with his lips spread around his knot, throat softly bulging around his churning dick. Yan had to shift himself slightly, half-hard cock unspooling a little down his thigh. it was fine; {farmer} didn't notice.

	his skin was already dyed deep purple under the sluicing layers of foaming black cum; with how little {farmer} wore, there was a heady thrill in knowing everyone would be seeing just how marked he was: skin dyed purple-black all across his hips, down his thighs, only forming lines and stripes down his calves instead of completely coating his skin. there were dark streaks along his jaw, down his neck, fanning out across his chest where Yan had gotten a little too eager with his sheath tentacles.

	After taking both their cocks, his ass was loose and open, yielding easily even up to Yan's muscular forearm. fisting the cum out of him just made Yan eager to pump a fresh load back inside him. unfortunately, he did have things to do with his life that weren't just lazing around the village, fucking anyone who'd have him, _despite_ what {trainer} said.

	"we're only taking a short stop back here," Yan said, low, fist still working inside {farmer}'s ass as he dozed against Neru's chest. "we'll be cultivating in the caves for a few weeks straight, probably." he could feel the burn of his partially-opened meridian, clogged passage in his {right pectoral} ever-present now that he'd gotten far enough along in opening it. "until we clear our second meridians. then we'll be back." his lips curved up into a low smile. "you'll have to pace yourself with what you milked of our issue until we get back. don't drink too much of it." he said it teasingly; {farmer} still whined, embarrassed, and squirmed his head lower against Neru's front.

not all of their issue got used to feed the mushrooms. {farmer} was cum-hungry. Yan would gladly feed him as much as he wanted, fresh from the tap, but there was something both cute and hot thinking about him hungering for the bitter tang of their voidcum so much that he surreptitiously made his way to his supply jugs, kneeling there so he could dip his hands into the rich murk and drink deep.

he probably didn't use his hands. the stains would show. only his lips were perpetually-dark. it was nice to think about, at least.

after a while, {farmer} was as drained out as he was going to get. emptied enough that his movements weren't slow and labored, and shifting his weight didn't make him hiss in pain. his ass was even more wrecked: fat lobes of bruised flesh bulged out along his asslips in lumpy, uneven furls. he was bruised red-blue, purple flesh swollen deeply. it made Yan want to break him open further. here, now, after they'd opened him up? he could take two fists. maybe even take one of their knots, turgid and spongy. they could get to knot-fuck him wider. the thought of it sent a heated pang through him. his cock rippled along his thigh, fattening up. Yan had to ease back and put some space between them.

before they left, Yan helped {farmer} with some work. he did _actually_ use the cum for farming. his latest experiment was bearing some fruit: a broad, shallow planter-box seeded with dirt and cum and spores, kept in a weak qi-funneling formation with a chunk of voidcrystal Yan had grudgingly let him break off from his cave. some of the mycelium was growing, coating the muck in grey-black filaments, and he wanted Yan's help in portioning it.

what this involved was Yan shoving an arm elbow deep in a fresh slurry of cum and mud, stirring clots of seeded mycelium. he made hand-signs invisibly within the murk, using a seed-sprouting technique. there was no immediate result; Yan was not very good at all at producing wood qi. for these purposes, letting some void qi leak into the technique was probably helpful. this was all he ever used the seed-sprouting technique for, anyway; at this point, he was better at spreading mycelium than actually sprouting seeds.