He told Lu Meng in late autumn of year three, because he had promised to, and because the change had become impossible to justify not naming.
She had been colder for six months. Not toward him — the warmth between them had, if anything, intensified in the way that warmth often does when it is under pressure from elsewhere. But her coldness toward the world — toward the sect hierarchy, toward peers who made small social miscalculations, toward the background ethical noise of daily sect life — had sharpened into something more precise and less forgiving.
She had always been pragmatic. She had become ruthless in a way that pragmatic doesn't fully explain — the kind of ruthlessness that doesn't come from character and doesn't come from decision but comes from the background emotional temperature of a person being lowered, degree by degree, over a long period.
She had told a junior disciple, in the outer library, to leave. Crisply, with a manufactured reason, when the real reason was that his presence was an inefficiency to her. He had left and looked hurt and she had not particularly registered the hurt.
That was the moment Kai saw it clearly.
He told her that evening. He told her carefully, using the same precision she used for everything — this is what I observe, this is what I believe the mechanism is, this is why I think it's happening, this is why I should have said something earlier.
She listened. She was quiet for a long time.
"The coldness," she said finally. "I noticed it." She was, even now, precise about this rather than defensive. "I thought it was adaptation. The sect environment rewards a certain reduction of empathy and I thought I was adapting."
"It may be both," he said. "Adaptation and the residue. They look the same from inside."
"They would," she said. She was quiet again. Then, very carefully: "Is it reversible?"
He didn't know. He said so.
"If I put distance between us—"
"It might slow. I don't know if it reverses. I don't know enough about the mechanism."
She looked at her hands. "I'm not willing to put distance between us," she said. "I want to say that clearly so it's stated and not implied. I'm not willing to, not because I'm not capable of it, but because the alternative — being in proximity to you, being affected by this, and knowing about it — feels preferable to the alternative, which is being away from you and being unaffected and finding that the absence costs more than the effect."
"Lu Meng—"
"I'm not asking you to feel responsible," she said. "I'm asking you to keep telling me the truth. When you see something, tell me. I'll tell you when I see something in myself. We'll watch it together."
He wanted to say something that matched the weight of what she'd just offered. He found that language was insufficient.
"Okay," he said, instead.
"Okay," she said.
And the autumn wind moved through the outer cultivation yard and above them the black vein in the eastern sky had spread to cover roughly a third of the sky's eastern quarter, and the senior disciples had begun holding meetings about it, and the Elder committee had drafted a report attributing it to natural karmic weather fluctuation, and the report was incorrect in every particular, and no one had the theoretical framework to say so.