No, she should have smiled and repeated what she had said the day they went to the Pill Auction: "Oh, stop practicing! You're already the best in the world!"
For a moment, her own foolishness made her nose sting. She bit her lip and looked at the boy, almost wanting to smash the already-cracked pot and be done with it.
"..."
Pei Ye felt stiffer than he ever had in his life.
He knew what he ought to say.
Just as the girl had made her preparations, he had actually rehearsed many natural ways to turn her down the previous night, for a moment like this.
Pei Ye had never found himself in such an emotional predicament. Asking him to handle something like this was like slamming a copy of the Book of Documents down before his bewildered face. Yet just as the girl possessed a keen intuition, an inexplicable awareness had always existed in the boy's heart too-their relationship should not head in this direction.
It could not head in this direction.
Pei Ye had tossed and turned last night, struggling to hold down his tangled thoughts and forcing himself to think about this for half the night. In the end, he had reached the correct conclusion.
-The sooner and more decisively he refused, the better.
Because the outcome lay right there, and he could not change it. It was not a matter of clinging, binding, fitting together, or any other kind of connection-it was the girl's wound itself. The moment these feelings arose, they had already grown into her flesh and blood. To strip them away, he would inevitably have to tear away skin and blood with them.
There was no clever way to separate them, nor could he make the girl accept this outcome without sadness. Having