"Back then... if you could have been a little bolder, perhaps..."
Yang Jie spoke wistfully.
Chen Chuanling let out a bitter sigh. "In the end, I was never worthy of him, whether in background or talent and strength... I didn't have the courage to say it back then. Looking back now, perhaps that was for the best."
Yang Jie lectured her with the frustration of one who hated to see iron fail to become steel. "Su Chen has never been someone who cares about family circumstances or background. I told you that long ago. It was you who had always placed far too much weight on such things. As for talent and strength, back then you were not much inferior to him. If you hadn't spent these past two years despondent and indolent, how could your cultivation still not have reached the Heaven Soul Realm?"
"I wasn't despondent." Chen Chuanling shook her head. "I've already moved on from what happened back then. I've completely let it go."
Yang Jie smiled bitterly. "Silly child, all these years, because of a single sentence from him, you have never once untied that ponytail in front of others. You never let anyone see you with your hair down. How can you say you've let it go?"
"I-I haven't." Chen Chuanling bit her lip in embarrassment. Though she stubbornly argued back, her shy, bashful manner already explained everything.
Scenes from back then inevitably surfaced in her mind. She thought of that wager, and the moment when, after losing, she had been made to untie her ponytail.
The humiliation brought by her defeat had somehow turned into embarrassment after she untied her ponytail and heard that person's words of praise.
Chen Chuanling asked herself why she had continued to wear her ponytail all these years. Though