"You're staying here?"
"Yes." Zara murmured her answer, not daring to lift her head. After hesitating for a while, she said softly, "The Western Mountain Royal Clan is enormous. Although it suffered devastating losses, some people must have survived. I'm the clan's last royal. I..."
She raised her head and met Chen Mu's gaze without flinching.
"If the clan has no powerful fighter, people here will only bully us."
That was her explanation.
"I'm royalty."
Chen Mu seemed to see the face beneath the ghost mask, pale from her injuries, lifted stubbornly, her expression holding a measure of pride and a measure of resolve.
Chen Mu did not know what to say. It was as though a cabinet of seasonings had overturned inside him, leaving a hundred flavors tangled in his heart. He could only look at her in silence. For the past two years, they had relied on each other, carving a bloody path through the depths of the Hundred Abysses, where danger lurked everywhere and every step was perilous. They rested together, fought together, and never parted.
Although he had never seen her face, he could trust her without reservation. During the battle with Hedilat, she had risked grave injury to give him a slim chance to strike back.
Chen Mu drifted into a daze, his thoughts suddenly flying far, far away.
Meeting her in the Jungle had changed his destiny. Because of her, he had also endured a great deal of unbearable pain, and had even once regarded her as an enemy. Yet fate was so strange: she had now become one of the people he trusted most.
Her choice was not wrong, Chen Mu told himself. Just as he would always return to the Federation in the end, no matter how treacherous the journey.
*But why