A Date with Xia Mi (4)

As the Ferris wheel cabin descended to the ground, the date came to an end.

The two underage prep students had no choice but to head back to school.

Passing the hill where Norton Hall stood, Li Lin heard the sounds of the construction crew drifting through the woods. But Odin Square lay on the other side of the hill, so he assumed the school was repairing the damage caused by Day of Freedom.

At some point, Xia Mi had let go of the hand she had been holding with Li Lin. Standing at the fork between the men's and women's dormitories, she tightened her little face and said,

"Corporal Li Lin, heed my command!"

"Yes, Officer Xia Mi!"

"Your practical performance tonight was terrible! Twenty points deducted for chatting with Fingel at the start, another twenty for being utterly unromantic, and five more because you didn't praise me for being pretty the moment you saw me today."

"Did I actually fail?"

"Hehe, don't panic. I'll allow you to take a retest~"

"..."

The two stood beneath the streetlamp, silently looking at each other for a long time before finally saying goodnight.

Once she had made sure Li Lin was far away, Xia Mi walked alone into the campus's chilly night.

Passing in front of Norton Hall once again, she had intended to take out her phone and invite Su Qian to the cafeteria for a cup of black tea, then chat for a while about the War Practice Class.

But Xia Mi lowered her head to look at the tips of her sneakers, lightly stained with dirt, and memories drifted through her mind of the days when she had first started going to school with Li Lin.

Back then, Beijing had not yet grown so tall, and the sky seemed wider. Winter wind poured straight in from the mouth of the alley, sending the loose threads on her scarf fluttering everywhere. A thin layer of frost covered the gray brick walls. A black-and-white bicycle was parked at the base of the wall, its basket stuffed with a wilted scallion. The breakfast stall outside the school gate had just opened, white steam rising from the bamboo steamers like tiny clouds lifting from the human world. The scents of buns, tofu pudding, and fried dough rings mingled together, warm against her face.

The little girl living in hardship could not afford that much money. She could only stand quietly outside that bustle, gazing longingly at the lively crowd before the stall.

Until that strange deskmate appeared.

That was the first time Xia Mi felt that she could not understand a human's gaze.

It seemed as though he wanted something from her, yet also as though he wanted to urge her to study hard, while worrying that she might suddenly die young.

Li Lin, still an elementary school student at the time, had come from an orphanage. His clothes made him look a little cleaner and more presentable than Xia Mi, though his clothes and shoes had all been donated to the orphanage after other children had outgrown them.

Xia Mi could not understand why Li Lin, despite living such a straitened and difficult life, was still willing to share his breakfast money and treat her to a meal.

It was like a grandmaster who had shattered his meridians to return to youth and then retired from the martial world, only to unexpectedly discover her, a "peerless genius," and devote everything to passing down all his skills while raising her to adulthood.

But what happened afterward was completely different from Xia Mi's original expectations.

She instead became the "master" who constantly lectured and guided Li Lin, while Li Lin was a dragon-level freak with seemingly endless adaptability, making her feel every day, from the Dragon Race's standpoint, that she was aiding a tyrant in his evil.

After all, with Li Lin's talent, that dragon-slaying blade, sharpened to deadly speed and edge, would sooner or later hang over her head.

Walking while lost in thought, Xia Mi wandered into the already deserted Norton Hall as if possessed, slipping like a ghost into the master bedroom that the campus maintenance department had cleaned yesterday.

She had specifically transferred a large sum from the club account and, through the connections Caesar provided, hired people to renovate in advance the building named after the King of Bronze and Fire.

Just as Caesar had said, the young man who had defeated them all deserved to live in this residence, a symbol of power and authority.

Xia Mi walked onto the balcony and pulled out a chair to sit down alone. From this spot, she could overlook half of Cassel College by following the slope of the mountain.

She imagined that the boy had already returned to his dormitory. Perhaps he was discussing how to pick up young girls with that playboy Caesar, or perhaps he was worried about the approaching War Practice Class.

Dead Servants, dragons, Nibelungen... the war that hybrids had to face was lifting its bloody curtain before him.

Xia Mi had been planning for this for a long time.

She believed the Secret Party would certainly throw Li Lin onto the front lines, tempering his strength with blood and war until he grew into the next Angers, transforming into a dragon slayer feared even by Dragon Kings.

Yet Xia Mi realized that she was actually hesitating over how to use Li Lin.

It was like the canary her brother had given her a thousand years ago, a tribute from foreigners. She had raised it for a long time, but one day it suddenly died, without even giving her the chance to turn it into a Dead Servant through alchemy.

When Xia Mi thought of Li Lin possibly meeting with disaster in a battle against a First-Generation Species, an immense sorrow immediately flowed through her chest.

But she quickly composed herself.

Xia Mi took out her phone and called Su Qian, simply discussing the various mission precautions in the Executive Department's files over the phone.

This year's War Practice Class had been opened specifically to certain first-year students with outstanding bloodlines or exceptional combat performance. The Executive Department was essentially a military organization, and its guns were aimed at every mysterious incident around the world involving the Dragon Race.

"By the way, Xia Mi, aren't you coming back to the dorm tonight? Don't tell me you're going to a love hotel with our S-Rank... wait! You two are still underage!"

The girl on the other end of the call eagerly pried into the progress of Xia Mi's romance.

"Stop spreading dirty rumors! I'm taking a walk around campus, okay?!"

As Xia Mi spoke, a smile crept back onto her lips.

Sometimes, she felt as if she had split personalities. The "Xia Mi" and "Jormungandr" in her mind were always fighting.

So Xia Mi must have won this time.

She added, "If you don't believe me, I can start a video call with you."

"Tch, what would that prove? I think you were about to get a room with your little boyfriend, then got too embarrassed and ran away at the last minute. Now you don't dare tell me the truth..."

"Su Qian! Get yourself washed and ready! I'm coming right back to teach you a lesson!"

"..."

Some time had passed since the call ended.

Xia Mi lay sprawled over the table, slowly savoring the desolation of the late night. In the distant residential area, the lights between the floors grew ever sparser, while the cicadas cried with heart-rending intensity.

She suddenly remembered a line Shen Fu had written in Six Records of a Floating Life, which she had read in fourth grade: "Coarse clothes and simple meals are enough for a lifetime of joy."

Xia Mi liked the second half best, because cola tasted pretty good. If the apocalypse came and humanity went extinct, she would probably try to recreate it with alchemy.

Thinking it over, Xia Mi realized that she, too, had once longed for an ordinary, peaceful life.

After school, milk tea, evening breezes, club activities, walking side by side down long streets with someone who did not understand romance, or dragging Old Xia along for grilled meat.

She thought that humanity's so-called happiness was nothing more than these little things, so light they could not be lighter.

After Xia Mi listened to the cicadas for a long time, they finally fell silent.

She sat alone by the table. As Xia Mi, she could choose not to think about Nibelungen, Dragon Kings, or the slaughter that would inevitably come.

Moonlight fell over her shoulder. For a brief moment, she was like an ordinary girl, trapped only in Norton Hall's night by the lingering warmth of a date.