Chapter 59: Chapter 59: Flowers
"Sister Shen, huh?"
Huo Yue watched the heavy doors of the throne room creak shut behind Ziyan’s retreating figure.
The cat-girl’s footsteps were still light, but they no longer held that frantic, uneven cadence of a person fleeing from her own shadow.
Huo Yue stood alone for a mont in the settling dust of the hall, scratching the back of her head with a wry, self-deprecating smile.
’I forgot I haven’t even told her my real na yet,’ she realized.
The na "Shen Huo" was simply an alias she had used during her travels, a combination of her own last na ’Huo’ and Haoran’s last na ’Shen’.
She thought for a mont, her finger tapping against her chin, then she simply shrugged the thought away.
There would be plenty of opportunities for introductions once the girl had actually washed the dried salt of tears from her face.
Then, with a flick of her robes, Huo Yue turned and left the room, her presence flickering like a dying ember before she vanished into the corridors.
She began to expand her senses, letting her consciousness ripple outward through the cooling sandstone of the palace and search for his man.
It didn’t take long before she found him, after all his presence was like a pillar of absolute zero in the middle of the desert’s residual heat—impossible to miss, yet difficult to approach.
She followed the traces of his Qi and found him on a high, secluded balcony, his silhouette frad by the darkening orange sky as he observed the sprawling expanse of the Lamia Kingdom.
Below them, the winding streets of the kingdom began to twinkle as lamplighters touched torches to oil basins, and the orange glow of the light spreading like a slow-moving wildfire against the encroaching blue of twilight.
Huo Yue walked toward him, her footsteps intentionally heavy to announce her arrival and just stopped a few paces behind him, her brow furrowed in a deep, disapproving line.
"You were too harsh on her," she said, her voice echoing slightly against the balcony’s stone balustrade.
Haoran remained silent at first. He didn’t turn around, his gaze fixed on the horizon where the sun was dipping below the dunes, bleeding a deep, bruised purple into the sky.
"I don’t think so," Haoran said finally, his voice devoid of any defensive edge. "She’s a cultivator. If sothing as simple as choosing her own life over others made her crumble that way, then she would be better off giving up on this path entirely. It would be a rcy."
He turned slightly, his profile sharp and unforgiving in the twilight. "The world of Cultivation is incredibly cruel, Yue’er. It isn’t a place for the faint of heart to wander. It is a at grinder fueled by ambition and greased with the blood of the sentintal."
He gestured vaguely toward the darkening sands. "Betrayal, fathers slaughtering sons for a breakthrough, sons poisoning fathers for an inheritance, the depravities of demonic cultivators who weave tapestries out of human skin... throughout the recorded history of the Heavens, there has never been a single person who survived and ascended while possessing such a fragile heart. So, to coddle her would be to hand her a death sentence."
Huo Yue sighed, the sound escaping her like a tired weight as she walked to the edge of the balcony to stand beside him.
Having endured three long years of bitter humiliation, watching her own family turn their backs on her after she lost her talent, and weathering the verbal abuse of those who once bowed to her, she knew his words were an undeniable truth.
The world didn’t care if you were "good" or "bad
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