Dragon's Descent [Xianxia, Reverse Cultivation]

Morning arrived with the sort of crisp clarity that made every sound carry farther than expected—birdsong echoing through valley walls, water rushing over distant stones, and the quiet movements of Song Bai preparing breakfast over a small cookfire.

Xiaolong emerged from her bedroll to find breakfast already assembled, tea already brewed, and a small bowl of dried fruits arranged beside the teapot in aesthetic alignment.

Ming Lian was still disentangling himself from sleep, but Li Feng sat cross-legged, accepting a cup of tea from Song Bai with the same polite grace he accepted everything else.

"This is excellent. Thank you." Li Feng indicated both the tea and the breakfast spread.

"It's my pleasure." Song Bai's smile deepened at his acknowledgment. "I remembered you prefer jasmine over oolong in morning hours. The vendor near the Eastern market had mentioned it aids spiritual circulation after rest."

"Very thoughtful," Li Feng replied, the statement carrying neither invitation nor rejection.

Xiaolong accepted her own cup—oolong, she noted, not jasmine. The default choice rather than a considered preference. Song Bai hadn't asked what she preferred, which was fine. Perfectly reasonable given limited supplies and shared mission priorities.

Except it wasn't fine, and the small oversight created disproportionate irritation that Xiaolong recognized as petty even while experiencing it.

Ming Lian emerged last, his hair askew and his posture suggesting he'd fallen back asleep briefly after unrolling from his bedding. He accepted tea with an incoherent mumble of gratitude and blinked at the rest of them like someone remembering how eyes work.

"You're an efficient camp steward," Ming Lian said to Song Bai after his second cup of tea and a plate of breakfast. "Should I feel guilty about not contributing to this domestic efficiency?"

"Of course not," Song Bai replied. "Everyone has different strengths. I simply enjoy creating comfortable environments when possible."

Her words held a subtle current of critique, like water wearing down stone over centuries—gradual, nearly imperceptible, only noticeable to those paying careful attention.

Ming Lian caught the implication and raised his cup in mock salute.

"To those who create comfort," he said. "May they occasionally remember to ask what others find comfortable before implementing their thoughtful plans."

Song Bai's smile faltered fractionally before recovering. "I apologize if my preparations were presumptuous."

"Not presumptuous. Just... thorough." Ming Lian's tone softened the observation without retracting it. "Though perhaps inquiring about tea preferences would have been more efficient than defaulting to hierarchy-based assumptions."

Li Feng glanced between them with the air of someone recognizing conversational currents he wasn't sure how to redirect.

Xiaolong sipped her tea and let Ming Lian's point settle.

They consumed the meal in relative quiet punctuated by logistical discussion about the day's route. Song Bai maintained her position near Li Feng, offering insights that sometimes complemented Xiaolong's assessments and sometimes mirrored them.

She kept her expression serene even when her words echoed concepts Xiaolong had just articulated—never stepping directly into disagreement or correction, but subtly demonstrating that her own observations had value beyond validating someone else's.

Xiaolong found herself cataloging these small demonstrations with growing awareness that she was tracking a contest that might not exist outside her own perceptions.

Each time Song Bai's hand brushed Li Feng's sleeve while passing supplies, each instance of her laughter at his minor observations, each moment of their easy camaraderie built from years of shared training—each became an entry in her running tally of small incursions into territory she'd never marked with formal claim.

Part of her knew humans weren't bound by the same territorial instincts dragons experienced. Part of her wondered why, if that were true, Song Bai kept maneuvering herself closer to Li Feng whenever Xiaolong stepped away from him.

Xiaolong knew she could disrupt that growing tally any time. A word, a gesture, and Li Feng's attention would refocus on their unique bond—ties that had grown stronger since returning from Li Feng's village.

But doing so while others observed would be awkward and disruptive, especially given the mission's sensitive nature and Li Feng's role as team leader.

And so the tally grew. Unevenly, sporadically, in moments so minute she doubted anyone besides herself was recording them—but grow it did. By midday she'd counted enough points in Song Bai's column to find herself distracted from mission details by the mounting tally.

"You seem tense."

Ming Lian's words emerged in the careful, neutral tone of a man well aware he's intruding into another's personal space and doing so deliberately. His observation came during a stretch of road that required paying closer attention to where one placed one's boots rather than to ongoing conversation.

"Shouldn't I be?" she responded evenly, adjusting her grip on her supply bundle to avoid placing undue strain on its binding cord. "We're heading toward sites of recent Black Dao activities and investigating potential threats against sect stability."

"That's not what I mean."

Xiaolong considered deflecting further, but the directness of his statement invited reciprocal candor. She nodded and exhaled a measured breath before answering.

"I've been monitoring interactions in a way that feels unsettling. As if I'm tracking each point of contact or concordance between Li Feng and Song Bai in order to determine whether they outweigh my own connections with him."

"Ah. Keeping score."

"Precisely." The admission felt dangerously close to a confession. "It's a fundamentally illogical exercise. Even if there were some identifiable ratio of contact to connection, it wouldn't negate anything already established or compel anything new to form."

"And yet?"

"And yet, I keep finding myself conducting mental arithmetic whenever Song Bai makes her presence known or her similarity to him evident."

They climbed in silence for several steps, the terrain growing more challenging as afternoon shadows lengthened and the path ascended a steep incline.

"Do you think," Ming Lian asked finally, his words punctuated by exertion, "that your awareness of those points is influencing how you perceive their interaction?"

Xiaolong nearly stumbled over a loose stone, catching herself before momentum could turn the misstep into a fall. Once she'd regained her balance, she offered him an expression that made it plain she found his question deeply unpalatable.

"I don't know," she said slowly, choosing each word with care, "how to avoid perceiving something that is occurring in front of me."

"No, that's not—" Ming Lian shook his head, rephrasing his thought on the next breath. "What I mean is, could it be that you're interpreting neutral behaviors as incursions because your current frame of mind sees those interactions differently than you otherwise might?"

"Are you suggesting I'm inventing conflict where none exists?"

"I'm suggesting nothing." He raised a preemptive hand in polite surrender. "Merely asking a question. Because it occurs to me that if your attention is currently invested in monitoring Li Feng and Song Bai's behavior for signs of compatibility, then any instances of harmony or concord could feel like small victories in her favor."

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The statement hung between them, a weight suspended in the space they carved out as they traveled. Xiaolong kept walking, kept breathing, though for a moment the effort of both seemed overwhelming.

"It's possible," she conceded, the words coming with unexpected difficulty. "It's possible. Though I stand by the objective fact of Song Bai's deliberate pursuit of closeness with him."

Ming Lian shrugged, the motion turned lopsided as he leveraged a protruding rock to navigate a treacherous patch of trail. Once they'd reached more level ground, he spoke again. This time, his tone held the quiet conviction of shared recognition.

"The thing is, when you're measuring proximity as points in an informal competition, you start seeing evidence of those points everywhere."

He adjusted the lay of his robes over his shoulder, fingers straightening a crease in blue silk without interrupting his flow of words. "Even if it isn't intentional on her part—and I'm not convinced it always is—the fact that you're looking for indications of their potential as a pair makes it seem like there are more of them than there actually are."

Ahead, Song Bai had resumed her customary position at Li Feng's side. She kept pace with his longer strides, her posture complementary to his in ways Xiaolong couldn't quite articulate but could readily identify.

"What I am certain of," Ming Lian went on, his eyes tracking the interaction unfolding just meters away, "is that the amount of contact between those two isn't determined solely by how near she puts herself to him, but by how far you distance yourself. And I know that's unfair, and I'm not blaming you for that. But even if you aren't stepping in for reasons I completely understand and respect, that space creates opportunity, and I'm guessing you know that, too."

They covered the next several steps in silence before Xiaolong spoke again, her words coming slowly, deliberately. Each one shaped with care for the edges they carried.

"You believe I should cease this monitoring process and reclaim my proximity."

"I think it's an option available to you," Ming Lian said. "But ultimately, I'm just here to remind you that we can all see what she's doing. That you don't need to keep track of it like this, and you don't need to pretend her pursuit is invisible in hopes it might go away. We already notice, and if it's making things difficult, you should consider doing something about that."

He offered a wan smile, wry and knowing. "For your own peace of mind, if not for our collective entertainment."

The first investigation site announced itself through absence rather than disruption.

Clearwater Crossing should have bustled with evening activity—children practicing basic water-walking forms in the shallow creek, elders gathering for sunset meditation beside the village spring, the comfortable sounds of a community concluding its daily routines.

Instead, silence pressed against them like physical weight. Windows showed faces that withdrew the moment they were noticed. The village square, positioned around a natural spring that should have gleamed with spiritual clarity, held water that looked normal but felt wrong in ways that made Xiaolong's senses recoil.

"Third reported corruption site," Li Feng said, consulting Elder Wei's intelligence summary. "Timeline matches the others—symptoms appeared approximately three weeks ago, escalating gradually until cultivation became impossible."

Song Bai moved toward the spring with careful steps, her spiritual awareness extending in waves that created visible ripples across the water's surface. "The corruption runs deeper here than at Flowing Creek. Whatever technique they're employing has been refined, made more efficient."

She knelt beside the water, her fingers hovering inches above its surface without making contact. Ice crystallized from her spiritual energy, forming delicate patterns that mapped the underlying corruption's shape and flow. Where her ice touched tainted essence, a faint hiss arose, like boiling water splashed onto snow.

The vapor that emerged smelled wrong—organic and cloying, not clean and crisp like spring-fed miasma should have been.

"Sophisticated," Ming Lian observed, crouching to study Song Bai's ice formations. "I didn't expect subtlety from Black Dao operatives."

"They've been learning from their prior failures," Song Bai replied. Her attention focused inward, her words emerged as distracted asides more than actual conversation. "Adapting techniques to specific conditions."

Xiaolong extended her own senses toward the corrupted spring, not through human cultivation methods but through draconic perception that read elemental essence the way humans read written language.

The water carried stains that went beyond spiritual technique—someone had impressed malevolence into its fundamental nature, teaching it to resist rather than nourish, to drain rather than sustain.

"The corruption anchors itself to the water's memory," she said, the observation drawing immediate attention from the others. "Water remembers what flows through it, what it touches, what shapes it takes. This technique exploits that property, creating false memories that override natural tendencies."

"Can it be purified?" Li Feng asked.

"Eventually. But the process requires removing each corrupted memory individually, which means understanding how they were implanted." Xiaolong straightened, her gaze scanning the surrounding village. "Whoever designed this technique possessed deep knowledge of water's essential nature. Possibly someone trained in orthodox methods before embracing corruption."

The implication settled over them like frost.

"A former sect member," Song Bai said quietly. "Someone who learned our techniques then perverted them."

"Or multiple former members working together." Ming Lian's jaw tightened. "Black Dao recruits from disillusioned disciples across multiple sects. They could be sharing knowledge, combining different orthodox traditions into new corrupted applications."

"They'll do it again," Song Bai said. Her hand traced the contaminated ice crystals with delicate care, her fingertips just brushing their crystalline edges without causing them to shatter. "If they've developed methods this effective, they won't stop here. We have to assume there are additional targets in the planning stages even now."

"Agreed." Li Feng turned to Ming Lian, who was still crouched by Song Bai's side. "I'll sketch the village layout and mark details while you interview locals. Any information about recent outsiders could point us toward future sites or identify potential Black Dao collaborators."

He turned next to Xiaolong, his gaze holding hers for a fraction longer than necessary. "Can you work with Song Bai to map the extent of the corruption? Understanding its scope will let us track progress on the purification effort over time."

"I will do what I can." The acknowledgment came easily despite their current proximity, something in the weight of the situation lending her voice extra gravity. "But I lack experience with human spiritual perception—I'm not sure my methods will translate well for others."

"Whatever you can offer will be useful," Li Feng said. "Song Bai excels at turning insights into practical applications."

"As long as those insights are clear enough to understand," Song Bai added, looking up at Xiaolong.

There was something in her expression that hadn't been there before—something wary, but not exactly hostile. Respectful caution, perhaps. "Your methods have surprised me in the past. I'll try to adapt to whatever you can provide."

"Of course," Xiaolong said. "I'm glad to offer any assistance I can."

For the next hour, the two worked in companionable silence. Xiaolong followed her own circuitous route around the village perimeter, using draconic perception to locate the places where corruption concentrated most heavily and tracing its influence through the natural landscape.

Song Bai kept her focus on the village's primary spring and secondary water sources. Her ice patterns spread across the ground in complex geometries that mapped the flow of corrupt essence, showing paths of influence and indicating which sources had succumbed to contamination most completely.

Occasionally, their orbits intersected, and they acknowledged each other with professional courtesy before continuing their separate investigations. It wasn't comfortable, not precisely, but it was at least functional, and the awareness of shared mission outweighed any interpersonal tensions for those few seconds of contact.

At the hour's end, they came together outside the village, reviewing findings with Li Feng and Ming Lian, whose reconnaissance had yielded less than hoped.

Locals had noticed strangers moving in and out of the region in preceding weeks, and some had identified descriptions that matched those of known Black Dao disciples, but the sightings hadn't provided any new leads, nor had they offered concrete evidence that would let sect leaders take punitive measures against the suspected operatives.

"The descriptions match what we've heard from the previous sites," Li Feng concluded, writing the final update in neat, precise characters on his scroll of investigation notes. "We've established the Black Dao's responsibility, and your corruption map provides a solid starting point for purification efforts."

"We did good work today." There was no ego in Ming Lian's observation—just professional appreciation for a job well-executed.

"It should have taken less time." Song Bai's tone held a note of frustration that seemed aimed at herself more than anyone else. "Our efficiency was poor in several areas."

Ming Lian glanced her way, clearly surprised. "It was our first attempt at this approach—there's always room to optimize."

"Always, yes." She flexed her hand absently, like someone testing a new callus on a finger unused to so much physical exertion. "But that doesn't mean we can't do better next time."

Xiaolong found herself watching the interplay between the two, noting Song Bai's subtle challenge and Ming Lian's response that managed to be simultaneously affirming and conciliatory. It felt like a small dance, one they'd practiced many times before, each following steps they both knew by heart.

Li Feng's voice brought her attention back to the group as a whole.

"Based on what we've learned, we'll head upstream tomorrow," he announced, referring to his map while he spoke. "Ming Lian identified a potential contact there who can tell us more about suspected Black Dao collaborators, and the next reported corruption site is close enough to combine the two objectives."

He gestured toward the landscape ahead, tracing a path along the river's winding course toward the foothills of the mountain range beyond. "If we make good time, we can arrive late afternoon, then split into two teams—Xiaolong and I will investigate the site while you two pursue the potential collaborator leads."

Ming Lian nodded, satisfied with the division of labor. Song Bai hesitated fractionally before adding her own acknowledgment.

"Understood," she said after that short pause. "It's a good plan."