Immortal Mortals

Retaliation.

It was another 3 days before Ai finally awoke from her drunken stupor.  Jie had remained by her side the entire time.  The first morning he could barely rouse her, she had drunk so much in the past five days her Mortal body was not used to the finer high quality wine and he worried that she may have actually caused some damage to it.  Immediately he had returned to his true form and gently fed her healing energy to give her Mortal body the strength it would need to release the toxins and to counter any harmful effects.  Though angry that she had not considered what Immortal Realm wine could do to a Mortal body, he couldn't help but marvel at her recklessness, he had never thought it would be possible for his sweet Ai to do something so against her Mortal nature that he was beginning to wonder if Bai Qian herself was finally beginning to emerge.

And it was while he was in his true form, that he stripped back the blanket and allowed his energy to fully read her body. Starting at her feet, he slowly scanned upwards, stopping briefly to hone in on her more private areas as he searched her body for any evidence of another mans essence, then breathing a sigh of relief and falling heavily to sit beside her, he released a long rasping breath, one he hadn't realized he was holding as the realization that she had not been with another began to sink in.

Silently he had allowed his tears to fall as he gazed down at the woman he loved more than his own life, thankful and overwhelmed with gratitude that she had not broken her vows, because he knew, that had he found the essence of another man on her, he would have walked away forever without a look back, he would have also cancelled his marriage arrangement.  Because their life together and what she meant to him was all he thought about from the moment she had returned.

But that did not ease his anger at what she had done.  He still wanted to know where she had been, because even though he knew she had initially returned for the wine, she had not remained in the Immortal World, she had arrived home far too drunk to have managed a cloud jump that immense in the state she was in, she had barely made it back to the house. 

 Too much of her energy would have been needed for the transition not to mention the coherent mental processes that are needed to  navigate the two worlds which requires a vast amount of strength and level headedness.  She just wasn't in the right frame of mind to be able to manage it, so that brought him back to the same question.  Where had she been?

And that had him wondering why she was wearing 'that' dress.  A dress he had bought for her to wear, for his eyes only.  That she had chosen to wear it away from him, had initially had him believing she had been with another, but now knowing for certain that she had not, that had him thinking that perhaps she was trying to make him jealous.  If that was her intention, then she had succeeded, but there was still doubts, because he didn't feel she would actually go this far just to make a point.  It just wasn't in her nature to be that petty or so damn reckless with her body.

And that had him thinking about the amount of alcohol she had consumed, because having scanned her body thoroughly, she had taken in enough wine for 6 adult men, and that was what he was able to read from her body that morning alone, goodness knows how much she had taken in over the past 5 days, and for a woman who never drank and considering how small she was, he was surprised she hadn't died from alcohol poisoning.

Never had he been so angry as he was then.  That she would dare to put him through the hell he had just emerged from had him rising immediately to prepare a sobering soup.  He wanted her awake and fully lucid before he faced her with his questions and punishment that he would definitely be meting out when he was done.

By the second day, and after yet another bowl of sobering soup, her fifth, he was beginning to panic.  She should have roused by now, but she had barely managed to open her eyes for more than a few seconds at a time, her small hands reaching up once to stroke his face before she fell back into her state of drunken slumber.  Though knowing she was a fox who liked to sleep, to have slept this long, just wasn't normal though she had made a small amount of progress.  She had began to mumble in her sleep, at first it was illegible and incoherent, but as her system began to work the toxins out of her body, the mumbling became a little more coherent.