"Have you eaten?"
Zhou Qing entered the cave, quietly came up behind Romantina, and patted her on the shoulder.
"Ah!"
The sudden touch startled Romantina awake, breaking her train of thought and making her angry. "You interrupted my thoughts! How are you going to make it up to me?"
As she spoke, the angry flush on her face took on a faint hint of pink.
"If it could be interrupted, then your thoughts were like trying to scoop up the moon's reflection from the water—you could see it but not grasp it. I helped you instead. Why should I apologize?"
Zhou Qing was not merely making excuses. If a single sentence from him could interrupt her and leave her unable to recall her thoughts afterward, it proved that her accumulation was still insufficient.
If she had accumulated enough, how could she have been interrupted?
On the contrary, if she entered Satori with insufficient accumulation, failure would be one thing. But if she succeeded, she might misjudge her own foundation, allowing confidence to become arrogance, and sooner or later she would suffer a disastrous fall.
It was better to interrupt her.
Still, Zhou Qing left it at that. He took out roasted Dragon Mane Snail Dove meat from the Gray Pouch and called over the Rabbit Girl, who had been sitting guard beside Namiki's Soul Shell, to eat with them.
"How did you do it?"
Hope watched the Rabbit Girl and Romantina devour the roasted meat and asked a seemingly baffling question.
What he truly wondered was why Romantina and the Rabbit Girl could eat Zhou Qing's roasted meat without paying any price.
"Doesn't the Equivalent Rule depend on the word 'intention'?" Zhou Qing asked with a smile. "I got this meat for free. It has no value, so naturally there's