Peerless Dragon-Slaying Divine Art

The archives were silent, so silent that he could hear the little she-thief breathing and the faint taps of her toes against the floor.

Li Lin flipped through the research report in his hands and found that from the third page onward, it was filled with scribbled ancient Hebrew. It described a mess of experimental theories, while the final page had switched to English and bore the words, "Nibelungen Project approved."

"Xia Mi, did you find the Nibelungen Project?"

Xia Mi shook her head. She held a torn piece of parchment, her eyes fixed on the incomplete contents written across it.

Perhaps ordinary people would never have been able to identify its original form from those mystical, incoherent sentences.

But Xia Mi was different.

Purifying bloodlines, refining Dragon Blood, even using alchemy to directly create members of the Dragon Race... these were all things the first-generation monarchs had grown tired of playing with countless years ago.

She read the opening line quoted from the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon—"Blood and qi are the spirit of man"—as well as several broken records in the middle involving the element of "spirit," and immediately understood that this was a technique developed by the Secret Party to forcibly push hybrids to the critical bloodline threshold.

Xia Mi handed the fragment of parchment to Li Lin. "Here, a fragment of a Heaven-Tier Cultivation Technique."

"Is it real?"

"There. The Dragon Blood Refinement Technique you've been dreaming about is right here."

"Can it be cultivated?"

"Not for now. This fragment is too incomplete. I'll keep looking."

Xia Mi gestured for Li Lin to come help. No ladder had been prepared here, and some of the materials had been piled on the very top of the bookshelves.

The girl took off her shoes and motioned for Li Lin to support her as she stepped up high.

"Let's make this clear first: absolutely, absolutely... absolutely no looking up!"

Xia Mi waved her little fist at Li Lin in warning. Although she was wearing shorts today, anyone looking up from below could still catch sight of the girl's most intimate clothing.

The pair of little leather shoes she had removed sat side by side beneath the table, their toes pointed outward like two quiet squirrels crouching in the shadows.

She now stood on the floor in a pair of white ankle socks, lightly curling her toes as though she found it cold—or perhaps she was simply waiting for Li Lin's reaction.

"I mean... do you really have to step on me specifically? We could still go outside and borrow a ladder from the Lionheart Society guys."

The moment Li Lin finished speaking, he shut his own mouth.

He had the distinct feeling that if he said one more word, Xia Mi would pin him to the floor with a hold and keep him there until he suffocated.

A sense of danger, like being coiled around by a python—

Seeing that Li Lin had fallen silent, Xia Mi kicked his knee in satisfaction.

"Squat down. Hold your hands out and get ready to catch me."

The girl said it as if it were perfectly justified.

This was the Lionheart Society's archives, surrounded by ancient bookshelves, sealed records, the silent history of the academy, and countless names left behind by their predecessors...

Yet the soft light fell upon her pure white socks, so white they were almost dazzling. Through the thin, dry cotton, he could feel the girl's soles, soft and light like a kitten's paw pads, slender enough to fit perfectly in one hand. Her body heat carried the strong scent of laundry detergent.

For no reason at all, the unbearably suggestive phrase soft fragrance and warm jade popped into his mind.

Li Lin noticed the girl's calves gradually stretching, her graceful, slender figure blocking the light shining down from above.

Her attention seemed to have suddenly drifted away from the ancient books covering the walls. With her head lowered, she was watching to see whether Li Lin was peeking up her shorts.

"How does it feel?"

"Pretty heavy. Middle school physics taught us that the smaller the contact area, the greater the pressure it bears."

"I'm not heavy! This heroine is as light as a swallow! If you dare run your mouth again, watch out—I'll step on your face!!"

Xia Mi pressed her foot more firmly into Li Lin's palm, leaning slightly forward as she continued angrily flipping through the brittle documents atop the bookshelf.

Li Lin silently listened to the sound of pages turning above him, the faint scrape of the girl's sleeves against the wooden shelf as she steadied herself, and his own increasingly distinct heartbeat.

He savored that strange sense of trust and closeness. After a while, he suddenly realized that Xia Mi was secretly laughing.

But he did not dare look up, afraid that the girl, embarrassed and enraged, would seize the chance to put him through a horrific armbar.

Every so often, Xia Mi sorted pieces of parchment, several bamboo slips, or books into a separate pile. Once she announced, "This is probably all of it," Li Lin hurriedly wrapped his arms around the girl's calves and lowered her back down.

To his surprise, he felt a little reluctant to let go.

Xia Mi piled a huge stack of documents onto the desk. Looking at the boy before her, her eyes were indeed brimming with amusement. "Can you help me put my shoes on?"

"You're grown up. Do that yourself," Li Lin said, waving a hand as he hurriedly refused.

"Hey, what if your future girlfriend is some spoiled little princess? She wakes up and wants you to help her change clothes or put on stockings. Would you refuse her like this too?"

"You make it sound like you're my girlfriend. Aren't we completely innocent?" Li Lin casually killed the wavering ambiguity in the air with one sentence.

At that, the smile vanished from Xia Mi's face in an instant.

Expressionless, she walked to the side, bent over, and slowly put on her shoes.

Once she had pulled up her heels, she clacked back over to Li Lin, and her usual playful, adorable smile returned to her face.

"Sigh, I really don't know what to do with you. Let's organize the materials together."

Having realized that he had misspoken again, Li Lin no longer dared make a sound. Sometimes, he wished he could strangle the version of himself from a few seconds ago.

Fortunately, Xia Mi knew that Li Lin truly had little interest in romance. At most, the hormones of adolescence occasionally made him pay too much attention to pretty girls.

In truth, Xia Mi herself had something to do with that. She had grown up being too familiar with Li Lin, always slinging an arm around his shoulders like one of the guys and cracking absurd jokes. It was easy for Li Lin to unconsciously overlook the fact that she had already grown into a poised young girl in the bloom of youth.

Ambiguity was like a bean sprout pressed beneath a stone labeled "childhood friends." No one knew when it would finally break through the soil.

The two of them divided the work and began sorting through the documents covering the table.

Li Lin watched as the Dragon-Slaying Binding System frantically filled his vision with pop-up windows. Experience points for all kinds of dead languages he had never even heard of before were skyrocketing.

This girl was far too diligent. She had been enrolled for less than a month... though she seemed to have always been this driven.

With Xia Mi constantly pushing progress forward at such a high frequency, Li Lin truly had little motivation to study knowledge that was completely useless in everyday life.

It was a subtle kind of laziness. Perhaps because he had always believed that he did not belong to this world, he did not care to learn about those ancient, brilliant civilizations that had once flourished throughout history.

Even "dragon slaying" was, in Li Lin's understanding, still rather far removed from "destiny."

It was nothing more than a high-paying job with no substitute.