To Embers We Return — Chapter 34
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Bian Jin was silent, trying to order her thoughts into words.
Shen Ni recalled the day their sect-sisters had visited. Then, all Bian Jin had done was warm her hands and put an arm around her waist through layers of winter clothing. Yet that had been enough to bring a flush to Bian Jin’s face and make her break out into a sweat.
At the time, Shen Ni had found it odd. Bian Jin had not seemed as if she were sweating from pain or discomfort — it looked more as if she’d been overcome by a wave of desire. But how could that slight physical contact between them have triggered such a strong surge of arousal?
Shen Ni had thought she must be imagining things. But now, Bian Jin looked very much as she had done then. This had all started happening only after she’d replaced Bian Jin’s old jade core with Ni’s Heart. Was it possible that—
A suspicion took shape in her mind. Then Shen Ni realised that she was still holding Bian Jin’s hand. Her head swirling with questions, she let go of it for now.
‘Shijie.’ Shen Ni placed her hands palm-down on the sterilised worktop, one on either side of Bian Jin’s thighs. She said, gazing directly into Bian Jin’s eyes, ‘You have to tell me exactly what physical symptoms you’ve been experiencing. Don’t hide anything from me, otherwise I can’t be sure how to test and fix it.’
Bian Jin could tell that Shen Ni had the same suspicion as she did — that Ni’s Heart was causing her some sort of sensory deviation.
The forging of Ni’s Heart had been a challenging and arduous process, Bian Jin knew. And Shen Ni had been generous enough to allow her the use of that precious masterwork in order to save her life. Bian Jin could not bring herself to utter a single negative word against it.
In meticulous detail, Bian Jin recounted every anomaly she could remember to Shen Ni — beginning with the night Shen Ni had knocked her oriole plush toy to the floor in her sleep and ended up unknowingly cuddling Bian Jin instead, to the time she’d accidentally scalded herself with near-boiling apple cider and felt no pain.
By the time Bian Jin finished her narration, the tips of Shen Ni’s ears had turned the same shade of cherry-pink as the lip-rouge she was wearing. No wonder Bian Jin had been so cold towards her that morning — it turned out she’d been molesting her shijie in her sleep! It also explained why she’d found dust on her oriole plush toy when she woke up.
Shen Ni wasn’t sure what other couples wore to bed, but she and Bian Jin always kept their inner shirts and under-trousers firmly on, removing only their outer garments.[1] Yet, even through all those layers of fabric, Shen Ni’s embrace had still been enough to keep Bian Jin up all night.
Shijie is that sensitive to my touch? she thought.
Now she understood why her demure ‘good morning’ that day had been met with such an icy glare from Bian Jin. So she’d knocked her plush oriole over onto the floor, then mistreated her shijie for the whole night. And her shijie had even picked up her toy and returned it to bed the morning after!
A sudden warmth she couldn’t quite explain was flowing across her heart. Reining in her drifting thoughts, Shen Ni turned back to Bian Jin and said in the measured, judicious tones of an experienced doctor, ‘Have you tested to see whether you feel the same heightened sensitivity towards anyone else, shijie?’
‘I have,’ said Bian Jin. ‘And I don’t.’
Once, when she’d been with Zeng Qingluo, Bian Jin had quietly plucked off a glove and allowed her hand to brush lightly across the back of Zeng Qingluo’s, as if by accident. She’d done it so subtly that Zeng Qingluo had not sensed anything out of the ordinary. Bian Jin had not felt anything unusual then — it had just been a brief, neutral moment of contact.
Since she’d decided to tell Shen Ni the truth, there was no point trying to keep anything from her. She added quite directly, ‘You’re the only one who triggers these unusual sensations.’
‘Unusual?’
‘Yes,’ said Bian Jin. ‘They’re unusually strong.’
Shen Ni fell silent.
She had, of course, become accustomed to there being long stretches of silence between the two of them. Today, however, it weighed heavily on her heart — though mixed through with a measure of somewhat incongruous delight.
Shen Ni tried to explain. ‘I told you that Ni’s Heart was still unfinished when I installed it,’ she said. ‘There’s still too much about it that I have yet to fully test. At the time—’
‘I know,’ said Bian Jin. She clasped her hands together in front of her, resting them in her lap.
‘At the time,’ she went on, ‘you were trying to save my life. If not for the protection of Ni’s Heart, I’d be half-incapacitated by now, if not fully dead. Ni’s Heart is so much more powerful than I imagined. Compared to that, what’s a little sensory deviation? Only the tiniest of hazards. You owe me no explanation, shimei.’
Bian Jin meant what she said: she truly was grateful to Shen Ni. Every time she had a brush with danger, it was Shen Ni who stayed up all night repairing the damage. Shen Ni had even allowed her the use of the masterpiece into which she’d poured her heart and soul, not to mention a considerable fortune. Bian Jin had absolutely no grounds for complaint.
She unclasped her hands, and they twitched a little closer to where Shen Ni’s fingers lay on the workbench. When she looked at Shen Ni, her eyes were bright and limpid.
‘You’ve been very good to me, I know that.’
Those words seared themselves straight into Shen Ni’s heart. All the tenderness that Bian Jin had withheld from her for so long was now being offered up to her in full measure; it was balm to her soul.
Bian Jin’s words brought Shen Ni right back to her childhood. Once again, she was Bian Jin’s cherished xiaoshimei, the apple of her eye. The covert battle of wills that had stretched unacknowledged between them this last while, Bian Jin’s harsh treatment of her six years ago which she’d never stopped brooding over — all that tension finally found its outlet. Wave after aching wave of emotion washed over her heart.
Shen Ni let her head droop, not wanting Bian Jin to see the play of childish feelings over her face. Once the tumult of her emotions had subsided a little, under the cover of adjusting her pose, she slid her hands closer to Bian Jin’s as well, though did not quite touch them. The sliver of distance hinted at the possibility of greater closeness.
Shen Ni laid out her deductions. ‘You already know that Ni’s Heart is forged of galactic chromium that I extracted from Lili Three. As raw materials go, its level of hardness and stability makes it just about a match for your Talent. But I needed to purify it somehow. Galactic chromium is notoriously radioactive, often fatally so, which made this a very tricky task.
‘I tried all sorts of different techniques, but all without success. Then one day, I accidentally tore a hole in my protective suit, cutting my finger. A chill came over me then — I thought I was sure to come down with radiation poisoning. But what happened next was something out of an ancient huaben:[2] when my blood dripped onto fragment of galactic chromium I’d been working on, its radioactivity levels plummeted.
‘When I had my blood tested, I found to my surprise that it contained traces of a very rare anti-radiation enzyme, one that could neutralise the natural radioactivity present in galactic chromium. Using the enzyme, I was able to purify much of the galactic chromium I had. After that, the forging of Ni’s Heart progressed more or less as planned. I built several digital models of the design at different stages, and detected no errors or deviations. In fact, there were no real complications up until the point I installed it in your body. I didn’t imagine… well, that the human body could be so much more intricate and subtle than a mathematical model.’
Once Shen Ni had finished her account, it was finally clear to Bian Jin what had caused this peculiar hypersensitivity of hers. Shen Ni had used her own blood to purify the galactic chromium from which she’d forged Ni’s Heart. Now the neural core was inside Bian Jin’s body, powering her every movement. Perhaps Ni’s Heart was simply so strong that it filtered out all minor pains and injuries from Bian Jin’s consciousness.
Shen Ni’s blood, meanwhile, had become the link that bound the two of them together. Her body now resonated in time with the beat of Shen Ni’s blood, which was why she felt Shen Ni’s every touch so keenly. Mere fabric could not block out or dull the sensation.
Bian Jin finally had an answer to the questions that had been plaguing her for so many days. The truth was not far off from what she had imagined — not that that was a particularly good thing.
Once again, the two of them sank into a momentary silence. This time, though, it wasn’t because they had nothing to say to each other. The seemingly tranquil air was charged with anticipation, of words trembling at the very edge of utterance.
Again, it was Shen Ni who spoke first. ‘I have a few backup neural cores as well. They’re functional, but they’re only ordinary S-tier devices. I’m not even planning to call them Ni’s Heart — they don’t measure up to the name. They weren’t compatible with your circuitry originally, but when I was examining you after that last big fight, I made a record of where all your modules and connectors are, and modified these backup cores so that they now fit you. You seem to be having all sorts of unexpected encounters whenever you’re out and about, shijie, so I thought it would be a good idea to have some spares to hand if anything did happen.’
WIth that last sentence, Shen Ni was of course making fun the many times Bian Jin had come home with injuries. The tiny barb might have gone unnoticed by most, but Bian Jin caught it immediately. She smiled slightly, then stretched out a forefinger and poked Shen Ni on the side of her head.
Back in the old days, Bian Jin had been able tell immediately whenever Shen Ni was up to mischief, or if her clever tongue was on the verge of a quip she couldn’t resist. Bian Jin was never annoyed by it either. She would simply reach out and give Shen Ni’s head a poke, tilting it sideways.
Shen Ni liked it when Bian Jin did that, and it never made her behave any better either. In fact, she would always lean her head even more exaggeratedly to the side, gleefully admiring the exasperated look on Bian Jin’s face all the while.
That Bian Jin would repeat the same gesture now took Shen Ni somewhat by surprise. It was no longer an elder’s admonition; there was something teasing about it, as well as a sense of resignation at Shen Ni’s antics — and, beneath everything else, a hint of sweetness that felt almost like flirtation.
Did someone as cool and remote as Bian Jin even know how to flirt?
Shen Ni’s heart skipped a few beats. She studied Bian Jin covertly. There was no obvious change in Bian Jin’s demeanour, and no sign that she might be feeling ill at ease.
There was a something bewitching about her shijie; those who spent too long in her presence became unwittingly entranced by that appeal. She was as silent and inscrutable as the deepest winter snows. Yet the more she held herself at a distance, the more one wanted to gather her close, to see what she was all about. As a girl, Shen Ni had found herself succumbing more and more to her shijie’s allure with every day they spent together. But when she’d tried to draw closer, Bian Jin had kept her at arm’s length.
Bian Jin’s long black hair spilled like a waterfall down her back in the lamplight, soft and a little damp from the decontamination chamber. The coveralls hung loosely on her still too-thin form, but at least her face was no longer as wan and haggard as it had been in the first days after their reunion. And right now, she was even smiling a little.
Shen Ni was entranced by that smile. She couldn’t stop herself from luxuriating in the glow of Bian Jin’s tenderness which had been denied to her for so long. That’s a smile from the woman of my dreams, she thought. It belongs to me and me alone.
Bian Jin sensed the shift in Shen Ni’s demeanour. I shouldn’t have done that, she thought.
In the past, whenever Shen Ni’s merciless tongue left Bian Jin amused and exasperated in turn, she would usually respond by giving Shen Ni a little poke in the side of her head. When she’d made the same gesture just now, it had been an echo of that old habit. The mood between them had been so easy and pleasant that she’d done it without thinking.
Shen Ni was grown up now; it wasn’t appropriate for Bian Jin to treat her as if she were still a child. Bian Jin had realised that almost instantly, but since she’d already done it, she told herself that there was no need to fly into a panic. At the very least, she should try not to let her discomfiture show on her face, lest it make things awkward.
That brief touch of Bian Jin’s finger had set Shen Ni’s soul all aflutter. Pull yourself together, she chided. She took a deep breath and brought her attention firmly back to the task at hand. ‘Anyway,’ she went on. ‘If we did exchange Ni’s Heart for one of these neural cores now, you’d be able to live your life much as usual. The only difference is, it wouldn’t be able to keep up with your Talent. I could remove Ni’s Heart for now, and replace it temporarily with one of these more conventional neural cores. That would give me time to fine-tune Ni’s Heart, and I could reinstall it once I was sure I’d perfected it. It would also spare you from having to bear with this heightened sensitivity in the meantime.’
Shen Ni had suffered so many pains over the forging of Ni’s Heart, and now she was suggesting that they remove it from Bian Jin’s body altogether. The very thought wrenched at Bian Jin’s heart.
‘We don’t need to do that,’ she said.
Shen Ni’s eyes brightened at those words.
‘Now that the Black Box has made its appearance in the capital,’ Bian Jin went on, ‘there’s no telling what sudden threat we’ll have to face next. If I were to change neural cores now, that might undermine my ability to hold back our enemies, putting the city at even greater risk.’
Bian Jin’s logic was unassailable. Shen Ni nodded in complete agreement.
‘It should be all right, as long as the two of us are careful to avoid any physical contact,’ added Bian Jin.
Shen Ni froze mid-nod.
‘With the Black Box running rampant through the city, it would be unwise for us to impair any part of our defensive capabilities,’ Bian Jin concluded.
Shen Ni deliberately brushed aside that last sentence, focusing instead on what Bian Jin had said immediately before that. ‘But it’s vital that we keep up with these regular inspections, shijie.’ Her steady gaze fixed itself in Bian Jin’s field of vision. ‘At the point I installed Ni’s Heart in your body, it was only half-finished,’ Shen Ni went on. ‘If we decide to leave it where it is, I’ll need you to give me the most detailed feedback possible on its performance, so that we can fine-tune it to perfection together. I’m not going to leave this project unfinished.’
Even if Shen Ni had not said this in so many words, Bian Jin would still have understood. An outstanding machinist might produce many high-quality pieces over a lifetime, but out of all these, only one might be a true masterpiece. And Shen Ni had poured so much of herself into Ni’s Heart that it represented the very pinnacle of her craft, at least for the first half of her professional life. It was inimitable, unreplicable.
Were it not for Bian Jin’s injuries, Ni’s Heart would still be in Shen Ni’s possession, being honed and polished to exquisite perfection. As it was, she’d given it over to Bian Jin in order to save Bian Jin’s life, and all she was asking for in return was data on its performance. Bian Jin did not feel she had any grounds on which to refuse.
But there was a problem.
Bian Jin looked down at her knees, which were still pressed up against Shen Ni’s hips. ‘How do I give you this feedback?’
Shen Ni spread her palm open. It lit up quickly with a white, gentle glow.
Bian Jin gazed at it wordlessly.
‘My original plan had been to use the mechanical arm,’ Shen Ni explained. ‘But if you’re hyper-sensitive only to my touch, that wouldn’t tell us anything at all.’
It was clear that Shen Ni meant to use her palm scanner to probe and monitor Bian Jin’s physical response, in order to work out exactly where the problem lay. It made sense. From a purely rational standpoint, Bian Jin could not fault her reasoning. But rationality was one thing; her feelings about it quite another. She already found it well-nigh impossible to keep her reactions under control when even a small patch of her skin brushed up against Shen Ni; she dreaded to think what would happen in the case of a direct, full-body examination.
Bian Jin closed her eyes for a brief moment. ‘There will be… some difficulty.’
Shen Ni was filled half with guilt, half with tenderness. In beseeching tones that had something of a child’s wilfulness to them, she said, ‘I know. And I won’t really touch you. My scanner can pick up your responses from about half a finger’s width away.’
Half a finger’s width away… I won’t really touch you… But even through layers of clothing, Shen Ni’s embrace had been enough to leave Bian Jin flushed and breathless. Would such a tiny distance make any difference at all?
But Bian Jin could never resist Shen Ni’s blandishments. Let’s give it a try, she thought. And if it does feel just as intense as before, I’ll just have to bear with it.
Let’s give it a try, Shen Ni urged silently. And if it does still trigger your hyper-sensitivity, shijie, I’m sure you’ll have no difficulty kicking me away.
‘Mm,’ said Bian Jin finally. ‘Let’s try that.’
Bian Jin rarely allowed anyone to come close to her, and the words she most frequently uttered were those of rejection: ‘No,’ or ‘Don’t touch me.’ And so when she said, ‘Let’s try that,’ it was as if she had, after a considerable internal struggle, thrown open one of the narrow doors of her heart, allowing the listener entrance into a secret garden that had hitherto been locked away.
‘Then… let’s begin, shijie.’
Shen Ni’s palm drifted close to Bian Jin’s cheek. The soft white glow from its built-in scanner made her skin look even more porcelain-fair than ever. The scanner would detect the intensity of Bian Jin’s physical responses, translate it into a figure — which Shen Ni called a tactility score — and transmit that to a screen that was hanging on a wall diagonally opposite Shen Ni.
Shen Ni kept her motions under tight control as she ran her palm over Bian Jin’s skin, lest she cause her shijie further distress by brushing up accidentally against her. Out of the corner of her eye, she glanced at the flashing, shifting number on the screen.
Shen Ni had always prided herself on her self-possession. Even if she were to be surrounded by ten Black Box-infected mutant beasts all at once, she was confident that her heart rate would still remain below one hundred beats per minute. If someone were to measure it at this very moment, however, they would have discovered that, for all the perfect calmness of her expression, her heart rate had risen sharply to one hundred and three beats per minute.
And the tactility scores from Bian Jin’s skin were even higher, taking Shen Ni aback. As she ran her palm over Bian Jin’s cheek, the scanner registered a tactility score of one hundred and twenty-nine; her neck and throat, two hundred and seventeen. And further down…
Shen Ni paused. She did not quite dare move her hand further down.
She blinked rapidly twice, and Bian Jin could sense her discomfort. Bian Jin had her back to the screen on which the results of Shen Ni’s scanner were displayed, but she could see its reflection in a mirror that hung opposite her. She could read the numbers, of course, but only Shen Ni knew what they meant.
Bian Jin was anxious to know what was going on with her body, but she could see that Shen Ni was lost in thought, and decided not to press her.
Before this, her bursts of hyper-sensitivity had always caught her unawares. They’d come on suddenly, sweeping over her in a rush, and left her flushed, hot and sticky; she’d hardly been in a fit state to take in the nuances of precisely how they happened. Now,with nothing else to distract her, Bian Jin could give herself over fully to discovering exactly how Shen Ni was able to rouse such a tumult in her body.
The warmth of Shen Ni’s hand glided across her skin from the promised half a finger’s width away, stirring up faint currents in the air between them. Bian Jin had imagined that this would be easier to bear than direct physical contact, but it was proving quite the opposite. Those rippling currents against her skin only roused in her a tremulous longing, an overwhelming desire to be touched. Waves of heat surged through her, piling up layer by layer, fanning to life the secret flame deep inside her body. With every wave, that flickering flame grew steadier, hotter, brighter, until it became a conflagration. Tongues of fire licked teasingly at the tenderest part of her heart; her body heat rose precipitously. A delicious tingling sensation was spreading down from her face and neck along her spine; the lower half of her body felt as if it were melting again. Her hands gripped the sides of the workbench tightly as she tried to hold back the shudders that were threatening to rip through her.
Her tactility scores were soaring dizzyingly upwards. When Shen Ni passed her palm scanner over Bian Jin’s cheek for the second time, she discovered that the figure had shot up from its original one hundred and twenty-nine to one hundred and eighty-six.
This took Shen Ni aback. That a device she had crafted with her own hands should behave in a way she could not immediately understand was something beyond her experience. It was the first time in her life that she’d ever faced such a conundrum. She pressed her lips together thoughtfully, casting an evasive glance at Bian Jin’s face.
Bian Jin — who’d decided to let Shen Ni ‘inspect’ her as thoroughly as she wished — had her eyes shut, and her teeth had caught slightly on the fullness of her lower lip. Her mouth was an unnaturally deep crimson, and moisture clung to the roots of her thick lashes where they met the reddened rims of her eyelids. She’d promised Shen Ni that she’d co-operate with the full-body examination; now, she was straining every fibre of her being to hold still. She might be fragile, shattered, broken, but still she endured.
Bian Jin might never know just how utterly alluring she looked in this moment, thought Shen Ni. Her eyes held a liquid glow as she drank in the sight of her shijie. She wanted more than anything else to touch Bian Jin right now, even to dig her fingers into her skin. Her right hand — which had remained admirably steady, as befitted a machinist of her stature — was pulsing with an almost unbearable heat.
Bian Jin might not know what the numbers on the screen meant, but Shen Ni did. She’d benchmarked the tactility score against data she’d personally gathered through a series of clinical studies involving two hundred couples in total. Each set of data had been subjected to careful analysis and synthesis before being incorporated into the database as a whole. While it might not be an absolutely accurate measure, it still provided a useful reference point.
A simple touch on the cheek from an ordinary acquaintance would yield a standardised tactility score of fifty. A caress on the same spot from a skilled and passionate lover would produce a much higher tactility score, between seventy-five to eighty-eight. The highest tactility score that had emerged from these studies was ninety-nine from the face, and one hundred and eighty-nine for the neck. As one went further down, the intensity of each subject’s response was determined largely by their own natural sensitivity and the skill of their respective lovers.
The question of ‘skill’, of course, did not even arise where Shen Ni and Bian Jin were concerned. Yet even though Shen Ni was not actually touching her, the tactility score from Bian Jin’s face was already close to the maximum score that had been observed from her test subjects’ necks. In other words, all Shen Ni had to do was move her hand in a caressing gesture while it was still half a finger’s width away from Bian Jin’s cheek, and Bian Jin would feel it as intensely as if some master of seduction were kissing and nibbling at her throat.
Even before they’d begun the examination, Shen Ni had already had her suspicions about what she would find, but Bian Jin’s condition was much more serious than she’d expected.
Of the two hundred couples who had participated in Shen Ni’s studies, some had been willing to provide her with the tactility scores that had been recorded while they were making love. The highest of those scores had been two hundred and ninety-nine — only a little more than the two hundred and seventeen that her scanner had registered when she passed it over Bian Jin’s neck.
Even with the gap between them, the tactility score her ‘touch’ had triggered in Bian Jin had breached the two hundred mark easily. What would happen if she placed her hand directly on Bian Jin’s skin? Would that feel even more intense than what other couples experienced when they were making love?
The coveralls Shen Ni had on were made of a light, breathable material. Now, a layer of sweat was making the fabric stick to her back. Heat was rising up from a certain spot within her, along with a flush of wetness. She could barely imagine how her shijie must have felt on the day the box jellyfish had attacked Chang’an and they’d crashed through the roof of that florist’s shop, when Shen Ni had begun sucking the venom out of her hand. Shen Ni had to admit that she’d been overcome by a wicked impulse then: she’d vented her half-formed feelings of resentment on Bian Jin’s supposedly ‘sensitive’ right hand, nipping and sucking mercilessly at the tender flesh.
Shen Ni’s hyperthymesia meant she could replay every detail of that scene in her mind without needing to retrieve it from her memory module. As she lay on top of Bian Jin in the ruins of that florist’s shop, Shen Ni’s mind had been in a tumult; consumed by her feelings of jealousy, the only thought in her head had been of leaving her own, exclusive mark on Bian Jin’s right hand. Reflecting back on it, she was certain that, had she been able to measure Bian Jin’s tactility score at the time, it would have been well beyond the two hundred mark.
It was difficult to stop her mind from wandering to the next, obvious question: if they really were to make love, how high would Bian Jin’s tactility score soar? And how would Bian Jin look when she was in the throes of passion, so cool and self-possessed as she usually seemed, so untried in these matters as she was?
***
Footnotes:
- A traditional Chinese outfit from the Tang and adjacent dynasties consisted of an outer layer of clothing, a middle layer consisting of a plain top and trousers (usually white), and a final layer of undergarments worn next to the skin. The ‘inner shirts and under-trousers’ Shen Ni refers to here are the middle layer. [return to text]
- In Chinese, 话本. A short or medium-length story or extended novella (often dealing with romance, mystery, or the supernatural) written mostly in vernacular language. [return to text]
douqi 随笔 