As if her mind had been completely bewitched by that singing guitar, Wakaba Mutsuki found herself stepping forward, inching closer, then gently yet firmly grasping the hem of Qianyi's trench coat.
Feeling the tug on his coat, Qianyi stopped bickering with Ryo and turned around.
Wakaba Mutsuki raised her head to meet Qianyi's gaze. In that voice of hers, always lacking in fluctuation but now incomparably earnest and pure, she softly spoke a few words:
"Qianyi."
"I like you."
Nijika: What Do You Mean the Band Vocalist Qianyi Found for Me Is Called Eden? (6K)
"Qianyi."
"I like you."
Wakaba Mutsuki said those words with remarkable ease.
There was no fluctuation, no hesitation. She said them as easily as bending down to pick up a fallen eraser, or pulling a weed from the garden.
For the first time, such a clear emotional ripple appeared in her barren, monotonous world, one made up of "cucumbers," "guitars," and "her parents' expectations."
She liked Qianyi.
This feeling was not because he was a powerhouse capable of changing heaven and earth with a gesture, nor because he was the King of a nation who could easily send her to Rhodes Island for the best treatment. It was even less because she wanted to rely on him to accomplish something.
Those things were too distant, too grand—grand like myths in a textbook. They could only make her feel reverence, never something she could embrace.
She liked him simply because he was an unreasonable yet incomparably warm ray of light, forcefully shining into the meticulously trimmed yet long-desolate garden of her heart.
At Moon Forest Academy, she was "the Wakaba family's daughter," an exquisite doll who had to be elegant, proper, and always smiling.
In her parents' eyes, she was a "work," a program without a