Chapter 223 - 190: Cold and Ruthless

Chapter 223: Chapter 190: Cold and Ruthless

Faced with Zhou Qian’s questioning, Huai Yu looked completely innocent. "Brother Zhou Qian, I didn’t hide anything from you."

Zhou Qian’s mouth twitched. "Drop the ’Brother’ and say that again."

Huai Yu hemmed and hawed, finally holding up her pinky finger to gesture. "Just a tiny bit. Everyone has little secrets. It’s completely normal for me to have a few, right?"

Zhou Qian sneered. "Right. Other people have a tiny bit; you have a billion little bits.

"I don’t know about other people’s secrets, but every single one of yours could get you killed if they got out.

"If you’re going to hide things, hide them well. Don’t let a single soul in this world know about them besides yourself.

"With you only telling me half the story now, you might as well just tell me exactly what’s going on so I can be prepared in the future."

Huai Yu smiled sweetly. "Brother Zhou Qian, I knew you cared about me. I never intended to hide it from you anyway..."

Even though Zhou Qian was fully aware of her tactics, he still couldn’t help but fall for them. He figured that she was just so young. Even if she might have been older in the past, the person standing before him now looked and acted entirely like a teenage girl, both mentally and physically. What could she possibly do wrong? The little girl had already been so honest with him; he shouldn’t keep pressing her.

"I can enter Sanqing Mountain directly from the Rose Corridor. Does that count as a secret?" Huai Yu asked obediently.

Zhou Qian was left speechless. For a moment, his chest tightened, his vision went dark, and he completely lost the ability to form words. Entering Sanqing Mountain directly from the Rose Corridor—she made it sound so effortless. But if even a single person in the entirety of Flower City, or even the whole country, could do such a thing, then what would that make those Explorers who had to take the highway and bypass endless mountain ranges just to enter Sanqing Mountain through a small trail?

"More importantly," he said, "have you already gone into the mountains? How deep did you go?"

Huai Yu thought for a moment. "I don’t think I went very far."

Zhou Qian breathed a slight sigh of relief. The outskirts of Sanqing Mountain were fine. They had gone in to clear the area before, and the vast majority of the flora there were unmutated plants. It was generally peaceful and normal. Even the few mutated ones had docile temperaments. With her Superpower and high affinity, Huai Yu should have been perfectly safe.

"Later, the time I ran into Kuang Biao, I walked up to a plank path halfway up the mountain. Nearby, I could see a tall, thin rock jutting out like a finger." Huai Yu slowly described the scene as she recalled it.

This time, Zhou Qian’s vision truly went dark. A chaotic jumble of thoughts crashed together in his mind. He had no idea if he should focus on the fact that she had encountered Kuang Biao, or on the finger-like rock. That was Immortal’s Guidance, a famous scenic spot in Sanqing Mountain. Based on Huai Yu’s description of how close it was, she had clearly gone in extremely deep!

Aside from the outskirts of Sanqing Mountain, neither the Defense Army nor the Guard Army had ever successfully penetrated into the depths of the mountain! Once an outsider stepped into the core zone, the rocks and vegetation of the entire mountain would go into a frenzy. The ground would shake, tree roots would burst forth, rocks would shatter, and vines would entangle... The danger was no less than that of the core zone in the Wilderness.

If it were truly a place one could easily enter, Huai Yu would have encountered Explorers on the mountain long ago.

He carefully selected some of these dangers and explained them to Huai Yu. However, she looked confused. "But the big trees on the mountain told me that they sometimes run into Explorers, too."

Zhou Qian countered, "Did they also tell you that they only encounter them at the foot of other peaks?"

"Um..." That was indeed the case. Seeing Zhou Qian’s grim expression, she swore, "I know this ability is unusual. That’s why, so far, only you and Lin Xuefeng know about it!"

Zhou Qian’s heart soured with sudden jealousy. "Didn’t you only spend one night with Lin Xuefeng?"

They had known each other for so long, and only now was Huai Yu beginning to divulge these secrets to him.

Huai Yu thought about it and answered earnestly, "It’s probably because of first impressions. The moment we met, you pointed a gun at me and demanded to know why there was an anomaly in the Rose Corridor. At the time, I didn’t even have a full stomach, I had no place to live, and I was sleeping in a tunnel..." She concluded, "You looked so fierce."

Although he had someone send her a sleeping bag afterward—proving that his fierceness was merely on the surface—his righteous aura as a member of the Defense Army was unmistakable. How could Huai Yu, whose abilities clearly didn’t fit into such a righteous mold, dare to casually reveal her secrets to him?

Zhou Qian raised an eyebrow. "What about Lin Xuefeng, then? He used to be a Garrison Officer, after all."

"But I didn’t know him," Huai Yu argued righteously. "If you hadn’t shown up, I wouldn’t have even known who he was. Honestly, things were a bit unpleasant at first. I thought he was a bad guy, and he scared me.

"But later, he actually caught a bad guy, and he even taught me how to kill him..."

Apparently, crushing that violent felon’s skull directly with water pressure was incredibly cool in Huai Yu’s eyes, to the point that it was influencing her in every aspect. Had that not been the case, she wouldn’t have been able to offer suggestions when Chen Xing was teaching Chen He a lesson. As for the other little things—cleaning the house, conjuring a Water Curtain for cover, weaving bamboo baskets, and even chopping wood—those quiet, subtle actions were completely different from Zhou Qian’s straightforward and blunt personality. Anyway, the two of them were just vastly different.

But Zhou Qian’s frown only grew deeper. "That violent felon with the Fire Ability—did he kill him right in front of you?"

He felt a vague surge of anger. The Huai Yu standing before him looked so small, not even as old as Zhou Ning was when she had her accident. She spoke sweetly and had an innocent yet stubborn mind. How could someone kill another person right in front of her? Furthermore, if he remembered correctly, that violent felon had his skull directly crushed. He had been tortured to death while watching his own brains leak out.

This...

Zhou Qian took a deep breath. "He taught you how to kill someone right in front of you, and you still think he’s a good person? Don’t you think he’s cold and ruthless?"

General Lin was a widely praised hero and the person they had always looked up to. But General Wu, once a hero of Flower City, was now labeled as "bad luck" in his heart. And as for Lin Xuefeng, the man Huai Yu described was clearly shattering the idealized filter Zhou Qian had viewed him through.

"He is a good person," Huai Yu nodded. "Even though it was scary, everything he taught me was useful."

She thought about it and added, "But it’s also true that he’s cold and ruthless.

"Even though he spoke to me very gently and smiled the whole time, the way he killed that man was truly cold.

"Maybe that’s just part of his personality, too.

"I thought about it carefully later on. If I were the one killing someone, I probably wouldn’t smile either."

As she spoke, Huai Yu sorted through her own thoughts. She gave a firm nod to affirm herself. "That’s right! Sometimes I can be cold and ruthless, too."

Zhou Qian fell silent for a moment before exasperatedly wiping a hand down his face. "Never mind. You’re out of your mind. Idolize him however you want."

Besides, Lin Xuefeng, who knew her secret, had already died in the Wilderness anyway. At that thought, a silent wave of sorrow washed over him. Because in the Wilderness, Lin Xuefeng was far from the only one buried there.