"Hold out both hands."
Ying Ru Shi stopped her wild thoughts and obediently held out both hands.
When Yan Qing touched her bandages, she flinched, but soon relaxed and calmly let him unwrap them.
A pair of hideous, ugly arms was exposed beneath the dim yellow streetlights. They looked like hundreds upon hundreds of centipedes writhing and biting together, and even touching them gave one a clear sense of their skin-crawling ugliness. Ying Ru Shi's hands were divided at the elbows: the latter half was smooth as suet jade, while the former was a battlefield from a nightmare hell.
"Terrifying, right?" Ying Ru Shi said softly. "If these hands touched you, you'd definitely feel uncomfortable, wouldn't you? I didn't even dare hug Hui just now. These hands have lost the right to embrace anyone. All they can do is grip weapons until death."
She thought Yan Qing would comfort her, but he nodded instead. "They are indeed frightening."
Ying Ru Shi pressed her lips together and hid her cheeks in the shadows, not letting him see her bitter expression. Even when she soaked in hot springs, she kept her bandages on, but sooner or later they had to be changed. Every time she changed them, they brought her not only pain, but also heartache.
To become the purest full stop to the Ying imperial clan and let the world know that the bloodline of Qi's Divine Martial Emperor had produced more than just a tyrant like Ying Le, but also members of the imperial clan who defended all living beings, Ying Ru Shi was certainly willing to die for the greater good. Yet she was still only a girl in her early twenties. How could she feel no bitterness when even she loathed the ugliness of her own hands?
But