Gu Ningyun had just regained consciousness, and her head ached unbearably.
She held her forehead for quite a while before making sense of her current situation.
Even after Gu Ningyun had lost consciousness, her awareness had not completely faded. Dimly, she had felt a warm, familiar embrace lift her from the cold ground, but the poison in her body had already left her incapable of moving.
When she opened her eyes, the person she saw was none other than the man she had once both loved and hated, the owner of that embrace-Si Que.
The man was sitting cross-legged, his eyes closed, simply rolling the Buddhist prayer beads in his hand.
Gu Ningyun cast a chilly glance at him, a trace of coldness curling at the corner of her mouth. That slight stir of emotion only made her head hurt worse.
She hardly needed to think to know he had saved her. Yet saving her and then ignoring her was certainly her style.
Gu Ningyun stopped looking at the man before her. Although the pills had expelled most of the poison from her body, she could not be certain none remained.
With that thought, she closed her eyes and began meditating to regulate her breathing, intending to examine her body through inner vision.
Just as Gu Ningyun closed her eyes, the monk opened his.
The monk pressed his lips together and looked down at the nervous sweat on his palm, his expression complex and unreadable.
Neither disturbed the other. After they had quietly regulated their breathing for a while, Gu Ningyun finally broke the silence.
"What should I call you now? Fellow Daoist Si? Or Master Ziyin?" A rare trace of coldness and mockery threaded through Gu Ningyun's normally gentle voice.
Hearing it, Si Que could not help slowing the