Under the moonlight, the girl had backed quite some distance away.
Lian Youming sighed softly. Honestly, he would not shrink from a fight to the death, yet hearing those words had left him momentarily at a loss, and he fell silent.
Xie Ruomei was stubborn and proud, and she needed neither sympathy nor pity. When she said she liked him, she meant it. She was not asking for his compassion or charity; she simply wanted to say it plainly.
Perhaps what he had said during the day had unsettled her.
He was going south.
This girl had tasted all the bitterness of the world since childhood. Her parents and grandfather had each left at some point, on some day, and never returned. That was why she treated every encounter as their last meeting.
Then Lian Youming walked over, following her.
Watching him approach, Xie Ruomei's bright eyes trembled, her gaze shifting. That brief silence seemed to have frightened her. Tears glimmered in her eyes, and she bit her lip, her hands clenched tightly behind her back with nerves.
She was terrified that her words would make the man before her leave for good, or sever the bond between them. As though feeling cold, Xie Ruomei drew in her slender shoulders and trembled faintly, her face pale with panic.
She no longer feared anything.
Yet this man alone was someone she could not bear to lose.
Even so, she still met the young man's eyes directly, wanting to see clearly and hear his answer.
Only when the tears in her eyes were about to spill did Lian Youming smile and say, "Say, how do you practice that ventriloquism? It's interesting. If I made you laugh, would you be unable to speak?"
His voice was as gentle as ever, just as it