Alice in Dreamland (梦境中的爱丽丝)

Don't Blink

The far side? Had Lady Hanami meant the side that was entrenched in fog? The side that both Wang Dafu and Wang Lifen had warned them about? That it brought nothing but no good?

Surely, the meaning was lost in her ambiguous phrasing, right? Right?!

"Lady Hanami, when you say the far side of the lake, you wouldn't mean over there, would you?" Shen Luyu questioned while pointing to the part of the lake that he couldn't see—the part of the lake that was ensnared in the fog.

"And why wouldn't I mean it? What are you trying to say, that I'm impetus or that I'm harebrained?" she clicked, snapping her nose up to look down on him from above.

It made Shen Luyu reflexively scrunch in on himself. What he had said was merely a question, and while obvious, it made him uncertain, hence his reason for speaking up in distress.

Feng Lian took a perfunctory step to stand more between Shen Luyu and Lady Hanami. Maybe it was to try to avert her pointed gaze from him to himself or finish the conversation as soon as possible. There wasn't much evidence to guess which one, but he knew it helped soothe him.

However, Shen Luyu couldn't take a lax breath yet; he stayed quite behind Feng Lian.

Lady Hanami's gaze instantly drifted and softened, "So, You plan on testing your luck to try and find it?" she asked, tilting her head and putting her hands on her hips.

"Not try, we will find it." His face no longer had that confident smirk that he'd been so pridefully showing off mere seconds ago. His air was now more menacing than anything, yet Lady Hanami seemed fazed by none.

"Oh? Then I guess you owe me another fight. I mean, that's the least you could do after I told you what I knew."

"That's fair. To be blunt, we're short on time, so we'll be going now." Feng Lian spared her not another second as he turned around and started walking in the direction she pointed. He lazily waved a hand at her, not trying to face her or saying a thank you as she deserved.

Shen Luyu bowed to her quickly, having seen the ground Feng Lian had already covered; if he waited another ten seconds, he'd surely be left choking on Feng Lian's dust. "Thank you, we really appreciate this." Shen Luyu said finally.

She clicked her tongue again, not saying anything else in return, and just as she turned around, Shen Luyu did too, having already expected this outcome.

He knew if he gave in to any more of her degrading, he'd most likely end up hindering Feng Lian's work speed, so he tried not to let it get to him—at least not any more than it already had.

To be honest, Shen Luyu didn't know why he even thought that. Why should he even be upset right now? He'd known he was weak. It wasn't a surprise to anyone, even if he'd been teleported into this world where he was a little stronger.

He remembered a poem he'd read in a book. The book consisted of six poets, all of whom were compiled into a single book. Shen Luyu remembered being drawn to it, not by the cover or the title but by a previous work of one of the poets.

His work usually consisted of somber thoughts and ideas that all aligned with how Shen Luyu felt, and therefore, whenever he found himself in a library, he knew that one way or another, he'd end up walking out with a book of his.

"In every birth, the same light fades, a shadow echoes where we climb, no step escapes the trace of time."

The first time he'd read the poem, it had made him grapple with inexplicable feelings that he just couldn't quite pinpoint. It had caused him to lose so much sleep that deep sunken eye bags rested under his eyes for months straight, and yet he still knew nothing. Shen Luyu had chalked it up to feeling kinship between himself and the words sprawled across the novel's off-white paper.