Is that so?
So that was how it was...
As he listened to He Yin's halting account, Chiba's furrowed brows gradually relaxed, his lips pressing together lightly. A complex, heavy expression slowly appeared on his face, while an equally complex and heavy feeling passed through his heart.
"Sorry, I..."
Then, after He Yin finished speaking, he did not speak immediately. He looked at He Yin and Zong Mi with a trace of heaviness, hesitated for a moment, then finally spoke with some difficulty.
"No... it's fine."
In response to Chiba's apology, He Yin and Zong Mi merely shook their heads, their emotions noticeably dim and low.
Chiba did not know what to say in response to He Yin and Zong Mi either. Silence descended among the three of them once more.
Now, Chiba understood why He Yin had been so downcast earlier. This time, not only had he failed to learn any useful details, he had asked something he should never have asked and learned things that were not suitable to know in this setting.
It turned out that this group of orphans had not originally consisted only of Zong Mi, Yu Ze, He Yin, and the six children between five or six and seven or eight years old. It had once been a large group of nearly twenty people. At the beginning, Zong Mi, Yu Ze, and He Yin had not been the oldest here, much less the leaders of this group of orphans.
At the time, the oldest and the leader had been a seventeen-year-old boy. Beneath him had been two sixteen-year-old boys and a sixteen-year-old girl. Those four had been the leadership of the orphan group, the oldest and most experienced orphans responsible for caring for all the children, including He Yin, Yu Ze, and Zong Mi.