I spent the afternoon wandering.

  The city was bigger than I'd realized from the inside, a few miles across at least, maybe more, the kind of pce that had grown organically over a long time rather than being pnned by anyone. Streets curved, doubled back and opened into squares without warning. Alleys connected things that had no business being connected. I walked for hours and felt like I was only seeing pieces of it.

  It had districts. That much became clear after the first hour. There was a theatre district with tall painted buildings and handbills pstered on every ft surface advertising performances I couldn't read. A merchant district that was essentially one long argument conducted at high volume across stalls loaded with things I didn't have names for. A port on a wide river that I smelled before I saw, salt, fish and tar. The particur thick smell of a lot of boats in one pce. Ships rger than anything I'd expected were tied up along stone quays, sailors moving cargo with the focused efficiency of people paid by the load.

  The wealthy district announced itself through the simple mechanism of the houses getting bigger and the streets getting cleaner. There was a general sense that the city was holding its breath and behaving, at least here. Large houses set back behind walls. Gardens visible over the tops of iron gates. People who moved like they owned the street, which they might have.

  Then the slums.

  I walked through the edge of them without meaning to, the transition happening faster than I'd anticipated. One street reasonable, the next not. The buildings here leaned against each other like they were too tired to stand independently. The smell was different, yered and human in ways I wasn't going to examine closely. Children materialized from doorways and alleys with their hands out, quick and practiced, and I gave a few of them copper because I had copper and they clearly needed it more than I did. I kept moving.

  The other thing I noticed I kept moving past.

  People in doorways. Too young, some of them, offering what they should not have had to offer. With the ft eyes of someone who had not very many options. A few of them clocked my situation below the belt with the professional attention of someone assessing a job prospect and I felt the ring pulse with complete indifference to my discomfort. I walked faster, got out of that district and didn't look back. I felt shame for how the ring wanted me to take advantage. It was something I'd have to keep a tight reign on.

  I found a restaurant as the light was going amber and ordered a meal. An actual meal, fresh meat from an animal I could identify. Cooked over fire, served on a pte with something roasted alongside it. It arrived and I looked at it for a moment with the specific gratitude of someone who had been through a particur kind of week.

  My big fat horse dick has gotten me real meat, I thought, and ughed out loud at my own terrible joke. Nobody around me knew what I was ughing at. That made it funnier.

  I ate slowly and thought about my diet since arriving here. The brothel had given me bread and dried meat, which had been the first real food. Before that, oatmeal and sausages at breakfast. Before that, days of forest berries, cum and Morning Dew, the tter consumed in quantities that I was choosing to think of as medicinal rather than examine too closely. Life was improving on a measurable trajectory. I had real food. I had gold. I had boots that fit.

  Things were looking up.

  I found a better inn after dinner, guided by the simple logic of walking toward the nicer part of the merchant district and looking for something that had a stone front and actual window gss. The one I found had both, and when the innkeeper showed me the room it had something the previous pce hadn't, a proper bathroom, small but functional, walls and floor lined with fitted stone, a drain in the center. Private. Enclosed.

  I could work in here, I thought. Proper collection conditions. No floor splinters. Actual drainage.

  I paid for two nights and carried my case upstairs.

  It had been a few hours since the alchemist and the ring was making its position on productivity clear. That steady deepening warmth at my base, the slow build of appetite that the ring expressed not through anything dramatic but through simple persistent presence. A reminder that the order wasn't going to fill itself. I had fifty vials in a wooden case, a bowl, a funnel and a pn.

  I undressed and stood in the bathroom on the cool stone floor and looked at my equipment.

  My cock was barely hard, still in the early stages of what the ring's warmth was building toward, but already leaking. Morning Dew beading at the wide fred tip and beginning its usual slow descent down my shaft. I watched a drop form, fall and hit the stone. I thought about my options.

  Then something in me decided to be ambitious.

  I collected a generous amount of Morning Dew from my tip with two fingers and reached back and worked it into my asshole slowly. The warmth of it spread immediately on contact, the usual sensitizing effect, my body opening up the way it had learned to over the past few days. I added more. Got myself thoroughly coated. Then I grabbed my cock at the base while it was still only halfway hard. Thick, heavy, the wide fred head manageable at this stage in a way it absolutely would not be in another few minutes, and lined myself up.

  In hindsight this was a mistake.

  I got the head in before the ring had other ideas.

  The moment the fred tip seated inside me the ring took it as a signal to get serious, warmth exploding outward from the point of contact, my cock responding immediately and enthusiastically and without any interest in my opinion on the timing. I felt myself swelling and hardening from the inside, the fred head forcing my ass open to a diameter I had never previously experienced and had not fully prepared for. My shaft thickening steadily as it went fully hard, my body making increasingly urgent objections to the entire situation.

  To say it hurt was an understatement. It hurt in a way that occupied every nerve ending from my lower back to my knees simultaneously, a deep stretched burning that my brain was receiving and processing, but not entirely sure how to categorize. Because underneath it, threaded through it, running alongside it in a way that made no logical sense, was something else entirely. I sat down on the bathroom floor and used my cock as a seat and breathed through my nose in long careful increments.

  I did not pull it out.

  This was a decision I made quickly and stuck to, the reasoning being that if I had gotten myself into this situation I was going to get something out of it besides an interesting story, and a sore ass. Besides, Morning Dew was already working, the healing properties spreading from every point of internal contact outward, the burning beginning its slow retreat from unbearable toward merely significant.

  I sat on the stone floor and waited.

  It took a few minutes. The pain subsided in stages, the Morning Dew doing its thorough methodical work, my body recalibrating around the intrusion with the grudging pragmatism of something that had no other options. The burning became pressure. The pressure became fullness. The fullness became something I didn't have a clean category for, overwhelming and strange, not entirely unpleasant in a way that I was going to need some time to think about.

  I started rocking.

  Slow at first, just shifting my weight forward and back, feeling my cock move inside me with each small motion, the ring lighting up immediately at every point of contact and running all of it back through my nervous system doubled. I grabbed my balls with one hand and squeezed gently, the added sensation yering on top of everything else, and exhaled slowly.

  If you have never had your own cock in your ass, I thought with complete sincerity, it's something I recommend trying. The logistics are prohibitive for most people. The ring had solved the logistics for me and I was sitting here on the bathroom floor of a better inn in a fantasy city and experiencing something that I was fairly confident no one on Earth had ever experienced. It was, I thought, with the pain having retreated to a manageable background note, genuinely remarkable.

  I varied the speed. Found different angles. The ring was drinking charge down steadily, the warmth at my base running deeper with each cycle. I felt the first orgasm arrive from two directions simultaneously — the familiar build from the ring's stimution at my base and something deeper, fuller, pressing against my prostate from the inside in a way the goblin club had approximated but hadn't quite matched. It rolled through me in a long wave and the ring took it and asked for the next one.

  I gave it the next one.

  Then another.

  Three or four cycles, the ring absorbing each one cleanly, my cock still hard inside me, my body running hotter with each pass. I could feel something accumuting, not just charge in the ring but something physical, a warmth and pressure building internally that was distinct from anything I'd felt before. A fullness that had nothing to do with the cock itself. Something the Morning Dew was doing from the inside at this concentration and duration that it hadn't been able to do from the outside.

  I positioned the bowl carefully on the stone beneath me. Got the spot just right. Then reached forward, braced one hand on the floor, and pulled.

  The exit took longer than expected and made a sound that I was deeply grateful no one else was present to hear. My cock came free with a wet pop that echoed off the stone walls and I felt my asshole clench and unclench in the aftermath, the sudden absence of the intrusion leaving my body cycling through a series of involuntary responses, the Morning Dew running freely as the muscles worked through their confusion.

  The bowl overfilled.

  I watched it happen with genuine surprise. The Morning Dew running out of me in a warm luminescent rush, more than any single session had produced, the bowl filling to the rim and threatening to go over before I got my hand under the overflow. The stone around it glowed faintly where drops had nded. A small green thing was already pushing up through a crack in the floor near the drain.

  I sat back on my heels, breathing hard, the ring humming with deep thorough satisfaction at my base.

  My cock was still hard. Pointing up at me. Morning Dew running in a slow thread from the wide fred tip, the head flushed and gleaming in the mplight.

  I leaned forward and kissed the tip. Softly. Once.

  "I love you, penis," I said.

  The ring pulsed once. Warm. Amused, if a ring could be amused.

  I picked up the funnel and got to work filling vials.