No, no.
Xu Qizhen shook his head.
He hadn't been insisting that he wasn't a child.
He was just telling Student Xiao that he was no longer the child who had cried when he couldn't find his friend.
He had grown up.
And he was stronger now.
"Heavenly Maiden..."
Xu Qizhen called her by that name, his voice carrying a hint of unfamiliarity and awkwardness.
He'd heard Student Xiao call her that.
"No matter what you think, I'm happy to see you again."
Uh...
Was "see" the right word?
Xu Qizhen hesitated over it for a moment.
Then he told himself not to split hairs.
"I looked for you for a long time."
"I finally found you."
"That's enough."
As for whether the Heavenly Maiden remembered him and whether they could act out the heartfelt reunion between old friends separated for years that he'd imagined countless times...
All of that was extra.
It would be nice if it happened.
If it didn't...
It wasn't really that big a deal.
He'd just feel a little disappointed.
He wasn't a saint.
Of course he'd feel a gulf between them when the friend he'd thought about so much hadn't missed him the way he'd missed her.
A very wide gulf, at that.
But the fact that she was a monster made him feel that the gulf in his heart had been bridged.
She was a monster, after all.
Not a human.
So maybe she didn't quite understand human emotions.
Maybe she didn't know what it meant to miss someone or search for them.
In her eyes, he was just an insignificant little episode.
But in his eyes, that encounter had left a deep mark on his life.
For more than a decade afterward, he'd spent his time searching for her.
There was