— ✦ —
She was fast.
Not just Level Five fast — specifically fast in the way that came from making speed a dedicated cultivation priority. Her qi deployment was optimized for movement. She covered ground faster than the power difference between her attacks warranted.
He read her first three attacks with the Pale Flame sense at thirty-one feet of range and stepped outside each one.
She adjusted. Not to a different approach — she widened her attack pattern to cover the adjustment angles. Smart.
He adjusted. Not to countering but to reading the new pattern's structure.
At the thirty-second mark they had exchanged twelve approaches and neither had landed a clean contact.
"You're reading everything," she said, circling. Not frustrated. Analyzing.
"Yes."
"What do you see?"
"Your qi deployment prioritizes horizontal movement. Your vertical options are three times less developed. When your attacks transition from horizontal to vertical the transition point has a half-second read-window."
She processed that for one second.
Then she attacked vertically.
Not into the transition he'd described. She went full vertical from a standing start, completely abandoning horizontal to remove the transition entirely.
It was the right counter. Fast thinking.
He moved backward and up simultaneously — not enough, the attack clipped his shoulder. A solid hit. Not damaging at this level but clean.
She had landed the first contact.
He absorbed the hit and kept moving.
She watched him.
"You let me find the solution," she said.
"I gave you accurate information. What you did with it was yours."
"Why give accurate information to an opponent?"
"Because the answer to the question tells me what your thinking process is. Faster than watching your forms tells me."
She stared at him.
"You asked a question to read my problem-solving method," she said.
"Yes."
She was silent for a moment.
"That is either the most sophisticated fighting technique I've encountered," she said, "or the most annoying."
"Both are correct."
Wei Xun, from the observation bench, said: "He does this in actual combat."
"I know," Li Qing said. She had not looked away from Wen Dao.
They continued.
She was excellent. The combination of speed and tactical adaptation made every exchange a genuine problem. She had absorbed forty-two stones' worth of partial technique knowledge from the plateau — not his techniques, but adjacent ancient cultivation methods that complemented her own and filled gaps.
At the twenty-minute mark, the exchange was even. He had landed four clean contacts. She had landed four clean contacts. The exchanges were getting harder for both of them.
She was improving mid-session. Actively incorporating his patterns as she saw them.
He was doing the same.
At the twenty-five-minute mark, she did something he didn't predict.
She stopped completely.
Stood still.
It was a mirror of what he had done in the match against Iron Moth. Against the assassin. Against Zhao Mingyu.
She was using his own strategy against him.
He looked at her standing still.
He felt the deliberate quality of it through the Pale Flame sense. She was suppressing her qi to minimum, making the read as flat as possible.
He stood still.
They both stood completely still.
The cultivation hall was quiet.
Ma, from the edge of the room, said nothing. But her expression showed something he had never seen on her face before: complete, undivided attention.
"If neither of us moves," Li Qing said, "the outcome is decided by who reads better."
"Yes," he said.
"Your reading is better than mine."
"Probably."
"Probably," she repeated. "Not certainly?"
"You have forty-two stones' worth of adjacent ancient knowledge. I don't know what specific patterns that creates in your qi architecture. I may have blind spots I haven't found yet."
She held his gaze.
Then she said: "Draw."
"Draw," he agreed.
She stepped out of the stance. He did the same.
She walked to the bench, picked up her text, and continued reading.
But before she opened the page, she said without looking at him:
"Same time tomorrow."
He looked at her.
"Yes," he said.
He had never encountered someone who matched his adaptation rate in combat before.
This was, he thought, very interesting.
The other three senior disciples had gone back to their practice but with a slightly different quality of attention.
He had passed some kind of threshold here.
He wasn't sure what threshold. But he felt the hall's temperature change.
He went back to the archive.
He had sixty-two more tablets to read.
And something new to think about.