Opening Their Hearts

The treatment room was quiet.

Pothos plants filled the room, swaying gently in the sunlight. Droplets on their leaves refracted tiny flecks of light. The two of them sat on the floor with their backs against the stone platform, neither in a hurry to get up-after being drained of strength, even moving a finger felt exhausting.

Ye Lingling's hand was still wrapped around Tang Yin's wrist. It wasn't deliberate. When the fusion skill dissipated, she hadn't had the strength to let go, and afterward... she'd forgotten to.

She was the first to speak.

"Have you been on your own since you were little?"

Tang Yin turned to look at her. The girl was gazing out the window at an old tree in bloom, sunlight tracing a soft line along her profile.

"Yeah," he said. "My dad... doesn't talk much. My brother's at another academy. I've always cultivated alone and eaten alone."

"Why did you come to Heaven Dou?"

"Our paths are different." Tang Yin paused. "My brother's path is over there. Mine, I have to walk myself."

Ye Lingling gave a soft "Mm" and didn't press him. She turned to look at him, and there was something earnest in her usually quiet eyes.

"When I first met you, I thought you were strange," she said.

"How so?"

"You were eight." Ye Lingling's voice was soft, but she spoke each word distinctly. "Other children who enter the academy at eight cry and make a fuss. They miss their parents and want to go home. The first time you stood on the training ground, there wasn't a trace of panic in your eyes. It was as if... you'd long since passed the age when you'd panic."

Tang Yin's breath hitched, almost imperceptibly.

He had no answer for that. He couldn't very well say it was because there was a twenty-six-year-old soul inside his shell.

"Nine Heart Begonia." He changed the subject. "What does it feel like?"

Ye Lingling lowered her eyes to her palm. The illusory nine-petaled white flower had already faded, but something faint surfaced in her tone, something even she didn't notice.

"Have you heard about the rule of the nine heart begonia?"

Tang Yin nodded. Of course he knew-it had been written clearly in the original story.

"One lineage, one successor," Ye Lingling said. "Each generation leaves only one heir. For as long as I can remember, my mother has told me that my Martial Soul is the most powerful healing ability in Heaven Dou, but that I can't live for myself in this lifetime."

She paused.

"Whenever anyone on the team gets hurt, I have to heal them. Dugu Yan's poison, Shi Mo's injuries, Yu Tianheng's old ailment-my life belongs to them." She gave a faint smile. "Even what I like, what I want to eat, what I want to wear-none of it matters. What matters is that I can't fall. If I do, the team has no healer."

Tang Yin listened quietly.

He knew the fate of the nine heart begonia lineage. He even knew what would happen to this quiet girl later on-but now she sat beside him, holding his wrist, speaking these words in such an ordinary tone, and the god's-eye view he had as a transmigrator suddenly sank away.

This wasn't a line in a book. This was a person.

"So that's why you always sit alone in the corner," he said.

"Mm." Ye Lingling admitted it readily. "It's not that I don't fit in. I've just... gotten used to making myself small. So small that no one notices me, and I can stay there quietly, ready to be called whenever someone gets hurt."

She turned and looked straight at Tang Yin.

"But you're different," she said. "The first time you entered the training ground, my begonia flower moved on its own."

Tang Yin remembered that day-the nine-petaled white flower had silently opened one petal.

"I knew then," Ye Lingling said, her voice as soft as a sigh, "that what you carry is of the same kind as mine."

The treatment room fell quiet again. Pothos leaves rustled in the breeze.

Tang Yin lowered his head and looked at their joined hands. Ye Lingling's fingers were cool and slender. They were the hands of someone who had spent years releasing healing Soul Skills, only to have her own warmth drawn away. He suddenly remembered the windless lake he had "seen" when the fusion skill was triggered-clean and still, with the exhaustion she never spoke of lying beneath its surface.

"Ye Lingling," he said.

"Mm?"

"From now on, when someone on the team gets hurt," Tang Yin said slowly, "if you can't handle it, call me."

Ye Lingling froze.

"I'll handle purification; you'll take the lead on healing." He didn't look at her. His gaze rested on the pothos plants filling the room, and his voice was low. "You don't have to hold everything up alone."

The air was still for a long time.

Then Ye Lingling's hand tightened slightly around his wrist. She didn't say thank you-probably no one had ever told the successor of the nine heart begonia that she didn't have to hold everything up alone. She simply pressed that surge of emotion slowly back beneath the still surface of the lake, letting only the corners of her eyes curve ever so slightly.

"Okay," she said.

Just one word.

But Tang Yin could hear how much weight it held.