The light softened, then finally turned into a brilliant sunset glow.
It dyed half the sky red.
A breeze stirred in the bamboo grove, carrying the coolness of night and ruffling her high ponytail.
The sky gradually darkened.
Night fell, and loneliness surged in from every direction like a tide, swallowing her whole.
These past few days, Lin Xuan had always lit the oil lamp in the house around this time.
He would talk to her in that carefree, teasing tone of his...
But now, there was nothing.
The bamboo hut was pitch-black and silent, with only her inside.
An unbearable pang of sorrow suddenly rose to her throat.
Her vision began to blur.
A crystalline tear slipped uncontrollably from her beautiful phoenix eyes.
It rolled down her fair cheek and fell into the dust.
Then came a second tear, a third...
She had thought she could no longer cry.
But the vulnerability buried deep in her heart had merely been sealed in ice. It had never truly disappeared.
Lin Xuan's arrival and departure had been like a hammer, shattering that icy shell.
Longing, hurt, reluctance to part, and even a trace of affection she herself had never noticed.
In that moment, they burst forth like floodwaters breaking through a dam.
As she scrubbed at her tears with the back of her hand, her shoulders trembling slightly,
a warm, solid embrace suddenly wrapped tightly around her from behind.
That familiar scent she yearned for enveloped her in an instant.
"Why are you crying?"
Lin Xuan's voice sounded softly beside her ear, touched with teasing but full of tenderness.
Qin Hongmian's body stiffened, and she froze.
She even thought this was an illusion brought on by missing him too much.
"You... you didn't leave?" she asked, her voice trembling and thick