Master Yuan's next attack answered that question, his corrupted sword technique morphing from precise cuts to a wave that rolled forth like a tsunami. She avoided the first surge, but more followed, wave after wave crashing down, driving her back.

"Stand and fight!" Master Yuan snarled. "You mock me with this evasion!"

"I'm not mocking you, I'm studying you." Xiaolong's hand caught his sword mid-strike, her fingers closing around the blade with enough control that the edge didn't cut, didn't even touch skin. "The corruption in your system follows patterns. Three major nodes at your shoulder, heart, and lower dantian. Secondary threads connecting them. If I can map the structure—"

Master Yuan's free hand struck her chest with a palm technique that should have shattered ribs. The impact drove her backward through two pillars, stone exploding around her passage. She emerged from the rubble looking irritated rather than injured, dust settling on her robes like morning frost.

"Rude," she observed. "I was helping."

"I don't want your help!" Master Yuan's spiritual pressure erupted fully now, abandoning all restraint. The hall's remaining water sources—pools, fountains, decorative streams—tore free of their containments and swirled around him in a vortex that scraped stone from walls and sent disciples scrambling for exits. "I want you to acknowledge that this power is real! That it's mine! That I chose it!"

The vortex contracted, compressed, then exploded outward in technique that had no name in Azure Waters doctrine because no one had ever combined that much power with that little concern for collateral damage.

Xiaolong raised both hands, her dragon nature blazing through whatever remained of her mortal disguise. Scales materialized across her arms, her neck, flowing patterns of prismatic color that caught light and transformed it into something beyond simple reflection. Her eyes shifted completely, pupils becoming vertical slits surrounded by rings of color that spiraled through spectrums humans couldn't perceive.

The explosion met her presence and stopped.

The floor shattered beneath her feet. Walls cracked. Support beams snapped. Pillars crumbled and crashed down like broken teeth raining around her. All the force that should have torn her asunder poured through the space she occupied but couldn't touch her.

"Yes," Xiaolong said quietly, her voice carrying harmonics that made the shattered hall seem like an echo chamber shaped around her presence. "Your power is real. And yes, you chose it. But choosing poison doesn't make it medicine, Yuan Shuilong. It just makes you responsible for the sickness."

She closed her hands, and the suspended technique collapsed inward, imploding in an inverted sphere of conflicting energies. Master Yuan staggered back, clutching his chest where feedback scorched meridians and nearly shattered his dantian.

"What are you?" he asked again, but this time the question held wonder rather than challenge.

"Someone who remembers what water felt like before corruption taught it to move wrong." Xiaolong lowered her hands, scales fading back beneath skin but leaving faint traces visible to anyone watching closely. "Someone who's going to fix you whether you want fixing or not, because the alternative is watching you destroy everything you spent two centuries building."

Li Feng's voice cut through the moment. "Xiaolong, behind you!"

She spun.

The corrupted water from Master Yuan's earlier techniques hadn't dispersed—it had been gathering, pooling in corners and crevices, spreading through cracks in stone, building toward critical mass while she'd focused on its creator.

Now it erupted from a dozen points simultaneously, black-green tendrils that moved with serpentine intelligence, seeking her vulnerabilities with coordination that suggested unified control.

Master Yuan's laughter echoed through the hall. "You focused on the wrong threat, ancient one. The corruption doesn't just enhance techniques—it thinks, it plans, it hunts."

The tendrils struck from angles that should have been impossible to simultaneously defend.

Xiaolong's hands blurred through defensive patterns, her dragon essence manifesting as barriers that the corruption tested with probing strikes, seeking weaknesses, learning her timing.

One tendril slipped through.

It barely grazed her shoulder, but the touch burned like liquid fire. Corruption flooded toward the contact point, trying to establish foothold, to spread through her meridians the way it had consumed Master Yuan's cultivation base.

Her draconic nature rejected it violently, essence flaring in immune response that burned away the intrusion. But the effort cost her—a moment's distraction, a fractional hesitation in her defenses.

Master Yuan moved into that gap with the precision of someone who'd been waiting for exactly this opening. His sword technique, enhanced by corruption and driven by desperate resolve, carved through her defenses and opened a shallow cut across her ribs.

More concerning than the wound was what followed it—corruption flooding into her system through the breach, moving with intelligence that knew exactly how to exploit her diminished form's vulnerabilities.

Xiaolong's eyes widened as she felt the invasion spread. This wasn't like the earlier graze that her nature had burned away immediately. This sought to anchor itself within her essence, to alter her on fundamental levels, to rewrite the principles governing her being.

"Now you understand," Master Yuan said, his voice rough but holding satisfaction. "This power doesn't just fight—it consumes. It takes whatever it touches and makes it part of itself. You can resist the technique, but can you resist the corruption?"

The invading presence within her felt heavy. Tangled. Knotted. Like something that had never learned to flow, that understood only grasping and binding.

Her dragon nature roared in fury, battering against the intrusion, but she restrained the impulse to simply scorch every tainted fragment out of her being. The collateral damage from such a move could endanger bystanders, devastate the sect hall, and unleash forces no one in the area had the capacity to control.

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Eventually, she'll be able to excise the taint. But "eventually" might take hours she didn't have, and in the meantime, the invasion was making her techniques unstable, her control erratic.

The corrupted tendrils pressed their advantage, forcing her fully defensive as she fought battles on two fronts—Master Yuan's continuing assault and the corruption trying to establish a permanent presence in her system.

A flash of silver crossed her peripheral vision.

Li Feng had entered the battle, his sword techniques creating barriers that intercepted tendrils targeting her flanks. Ming Lian appeared from another angle, his water manipulation clearing corruption from environmental sources before they could join the attack. Song Bai manifested ice barriers that bought seconds of respite.

"Get out!" Xiaolong shouted, but even as she spoke, Master Yuan's attention shifted to the new arrivals.

His face twisted with recognition and something approaching paternal rage. "My disciples dare interrupt?"

The next technique he manifested targeted all three simultaneously—pressure waves designed to crush rather than cut, driven by power that Ocean Depth cultivation made overwhelming against River Current opponents.

Li Feng's defensive formation cracked under the first impact. Ming Lian's redirection techniques failed completely, unable to handle forces beyond their capacity. Song Bai's ice barriers shattered like glass.

All three went down, their bodies striking stone hard enough to break bones.

Xiaolong's rage manifested as physical force that pressed against the hall's walls, making ancient timbers groan. The corruption in her system recoiled from the fury, momentarily suppressed by emotion so pure it transcended simple anger into something approaching existential denial.

Her dragon nature emerged fully now, abandoning any pretense of mortal limitation. Scales erupted across her entire body, her form growing slightly taller as aspects of her true shape asserted themselves through flesh that could no longer contain them. Her eyes blazed with light that cast prismatic patterns across every surface, turning the ruined hall into something approaching a cathedral consecrated to impossible beauty.

Master Yuan retreated a step, his corrupted confidence faltering before presence that made Ocean Depth cultivation seem like puddles facing oceans.

"What... what realm are you actually at?" His voice carried fear poorly hidden beneath bravado.

"Realm?" Xiaolong's laugh held no humor. "You're thinking too small, Yuan Shuilong. Cultivation realms are human frameworks for measuring progress toward goals. Dragons don't progress—we simply are, and what we are transcends your measurement systems entirely."

She moved, and the distance between them ceased to matter. One moment she stood ten zhang away, the next her hand closed around his throat, lifting him from the ground with strength that made struggling pointless.

"But here's what I've learned during my time becoming something smaller," she continued, her voice conversational despite her grip. "Power alone solves nothing. Domination achieves nothing. You can force submission, but you can't force healing, and without healing, victory is just delayed defeat."

The corruption in her system chose that moment to surge again, exploiting her divided attention. Dark threads wrapped around her meridians, squeezing, trying to cut off essence flow.

Her grip on Master Yuan loosened involuntarily. He dropped, gasping, his hand rising toward technique that would capitalize on her moment of weakness.

Then Elder Wei was there, his cultivation depleted but his determination absolute, his discipline rod striking Master Yuan's wrist hard enough to disrupt the technique. Elder Liu manifested beside him, her fan creating barriers that intercepted the ambient corruption.

"Go," Elder Wei said, meeting Xiaolong's eyes. "Do what you need to do. We'll hold him."

"You can't—"

"We can hold him long enough." Elder Liu's smile carried grim acceptance. "We're elders of Azure Waters Sect. Protecting our people is literally our purpose. Even when our people include mysterious dragon cultivators who've been pretending to be eccentric guests."

Master Yuan laughed weakly. "Even now, you maintain your pathetic loyalty to orthodox principles. Can't you see how it chains you?"

"Loyalty doesn't chain," Elder Wei replied, his spiritual pressure flaring despite his injuries. "It anchors. Something corruption will never let you understand."

He attacked, Elder Liu moving in concert, their combined techniques creating formation that trapped Master Yuan within barriers designed for restraint rather than harm. The corrupted sect leader raged against the containment, his power making the barriers crack and groan, but they held—barely, desperately, buying seconds that might cost both elders everything.

Xiaolong turned her attention inward, examining the corruption threading through her system with clinical focus. The invasion had established three major nodes—shoulder, heart, lower dantian—exactly the same pattern she'd observed in Master Yuan. The technique was copying itself, using her own essence as raw material to reproduce its structure.

Clever. Horrifying, but clever.

She needed to purge it, but simple rejection wouldn't work now that it had integrated so deeply. Forcing it out would damage her own meridians, potentially crippling her reverse cultivation progress.

Which meant she needed to understand it first. To see not just what it was, but why it existed, what purpose it served, what natural principle it had inverted to create this perversion.

Li Feng's earlier words echoed in her memory: Understanding corruption too well can be its own danger.

But understanding was the only path forward. She couldn't dominate the corruption away—that would just be using Black Dao logic against itself. She had to recognize what it had been before inversion, help it remember its true nature, and guide it back to harmonic alignment.

The same technique she'd theorized for purifying corrupted water sources, but applied to living cultivation instead of environmental essence.

Applied to herself first, to prove the theory worked, to understand the process intimately enough that she could then apply it to Master Yuan without destroying him in the attempt.

Behind her, Elder Wei cried out as Master Yuan's latest assault shattered part of their formation. The barrier reformed, but weaker, fracturing under the pressure that Ocean Depth cultivation made impossible to contain indefinitely.

No more time for caution. No more luxury of careful experimentation.

Xiaolong closed her eyes and dove into the corruption, letting it wash over her awareness, feeling how it moved and thought and sought to transform everything it touched. She followed the threads back to their source, traced the inversions to their original principles, and saw how natural water essence had been twisted into something that denied its own nature while claiming to express it more authentically.

And in that seeing, she understood.

The corruption wasn't actually evil—it was confused. Lost. It had been convinced that up was down, that flow meant stagnation, that harmony required dominance. The Black Dao techniques didn't create new energy, they simply lied to existing energy until it forgot what truth felt like.

Which meant the cure wasn't rejection or domination. It was recognition.

Helping the corrupted essence remember what it had been before someone taught it to hate itself.

Xiaolong opened her eyes, scales blazing with light that pushed back shadows. She knew what had to be done now. Knew the cost it would require, the vulnerability she'd have to accept, the risk that would accompany attempting purification while corruption still coursed through her own system.

But she also knew that sometimes the only way forward was through the thing you feared most.

She turned toward Master Yuan, who'd finally broken through the elders' formation and stood panting amid the ruins, his corruption-twisted cultivation blazing with dark triumph.

"One more round, Yuan Shuilong," she said, her voice carrying absolute certainty. "And this time, when it ends, you're going to remember who you actually are."

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