Mei Lin felt fortunate that her wound had started to heal over the past few days; otherwise, just dragging Murong Jing He would have been a life-threatening task, let alone carrying other things as well.
Even so, even if her wound were completely healed, dragging Murong Jing He while crawling was still an exhausting ordeal.
"What exactly was this path made for?" Mei Lin muttered as she lay on her stomach, staring at the distant torch she had wedged into a crack in the tunnel wall. It seemed as though she would never reach it.
She had initially planned to narrow the bamboo cart, but when she started cutting it, she accidentally severed the ropes into several pieces, causing the entire cart to fall apart beyond repair. So now, the situation was that she first took the torch and other items ahead, clearing away the cobwebs and insects along the way, and then returned to carry Murong Jing He forward, repeating the process over and over.
Murong Jing He's muscles were firm, and despite his injury, he hadn’t lost weight. His tall, lean frame made him incredibly heavy. Standing was one thing, but crawling made it nearly impossible to carry him on her back or in her arms. Mei Lin was practically inching forward, both she and Murong Jing He enduring the arduous effort without a word of complaint.
Hearing her rhetorical question, Murong Jing He, lying on her back, glanced ahead as well. In the depths of the torchlight, the darkness continued, seemingly endless. The low ceiling and the endless darkness created a suffocating pressure. If it weren’t for him, or for her, or if either of them were alone in this place, they would likely go mad in no time.
A feeling he couldn’t quite describe welled up inside him. He suddenly lowered his head, brushing past Mei Lin’s ear and kissing her cheek, then simply rested his head against hers without moving.
Mei Lin froze for a moment, her face flushing red. Gritting her teeth, she pushed herself up and continued crawling forward. Whether it was from exertion or the sudden closeness, her heart pounded rapidly.
Murong Jing He didn’t tease her about her reddened ears, and she didn’t scold him for his boldness. In this place, in this narrow space with no end in sight, both ahead and behind, they felt, for the first time, a sense of mutual dependence. Beyond each other, there was no one else. Those so-called grudges, those things and people they had once held dear, were far away, separated by this tunnel as if they belonged to another world.
Perhaps because of this newfound sense of intimacy or warmth between them, the road ahead no longer seemed so unbearable. The occasional conversations, despite their breathlessness, became memories that Mei Lin would look back on with a smile for many years.
"That war god... was he the Zang Zhong Wang you mentioned before?" she asked, her voice echoing in the tunnel, growing quieter as she spoke.
"Yes," Murong Jing He replied. Seeing sweat slide down her brow and over her tiny beauty mark, he couldn’t resist leaning down to lick it, as he had once longed to do.
Mei Lin blushed even more, instinctively turning her head slightly away in shy annoyance. "Don't move so much; you're heavy." She shouldn’t have felt shy—they had already done much more intimate things—there was no reason for such a small gesture to embarrass her.
Her rapid heartbeat seemed to transmit through their close contact, and Murong Jing He felt as if something were trying to leap out of his chest. He pressed even closer to her. In that moment, he thought that if he could move, he would embrace her, giving her all the tenderness he could offer. But that was only in that fleeting instant. Once they left that strange place, neither of them brought up those feelings again; perhaps they had forgotten, or maybe they had buried them deep inside, unwilling to confront them.
"You're a prince; why did you kneel to him?" Mei Lin shook her head, trying to shift her focus away from his warm breath.
Murong Jing He hesitated for a moment before answering. He didn’t address the question directly but instead shared his speculation.
When the Murong clan overthrew the Hu people's rule, the stone forest wasn’t yet a scorched battlefield; it might have been as lush and verdant as other places. The remnants of the Hu clan hid there, and Zang Zhong Wang led a group to hunt them down, successfully crossing the stone forest and wiping out the enemy despite some sacrifices. But just as the mantis stalks the cicada, unaware of the oriole behind, before Zang Zhong Wang could emerge victorious from the forest—or perhaps while the battle was still raging—someone set fire to the forest’s perimeter with a highly toxic substance, turning the entire forest into a charred wasteland. Zang Zhong Wang and his two subordinates took refuge in a pit dug by the enemy, but in the end, they couldn’t escape the poison that had already entered their bodies.
Murong Jing He explained that this was only his guess, but Mei Lin knew he was likely close to the truth. She suspected he even knew who had poisoned the forest or who had given the order. He knew who the "Qian traitor" Zang Zhong Wang referred to was, but he didn’t say, either because he didn’t want to or because he couldn’t. She didn’t press him on it because, in truth, she didn’t care. The Murong clan, the Hu people, and even Zang Zhong Wang were all too far removed from her world.
She liked listening to him talk, slow and deliberate, pausing after each sentence as if weighing what to say and what to hold back. She had to admit that when he spoke without sarcasm or arrogance, it was impossible to dislike him.
She asked him what was wrong with his body. He hadn’t been willing to answer before, but now he confessed honestly. It was then that she learned his meridians were shattered. She suddenly didn’t know how to respond. Shattered meridians—perhaps that was even harder to heal than the poison in her own body. She wondered if she might end up taking care of him for the rest of her life. And if that were the case, it wouldn’t be so bad. But she wasn’t sure if her own body could endure that long. If it couldn’t, what would happen to him? She began to worry.
"What’s your name?" Murong Jing He suddenly wanted to know the name of this woman who had endured so much hardship with him, who had a sharp tongue but had never truly abandoned him no matter how difficult things got. Maybe someone had mentioned it to him before, but he had never paid attention.
Mei Lin frowned slightly, feeling a bit irritated that after all this time, he still didn’t remember her name, but she quickly smiled.
"Mei Lin." It didn’t matter if he knew her name or not—he wasn’t someone who cared about her. She would rather formally introduce herself in this moment. "But I don’t like Mei Lin. I like 'Chun Hua', like the flowers that bloom all over the mountains in February." She said.
"Mei Lin... Chun Hua..." Murong Jing He repeated both names, then smiled and kept saying "Chun Hua" before nibbling on Mei Lin’s ear.
It tickled her, making her feel both itchy and tingly, and she couldn’t help but laugh. Laughing made her go weak, and she collapsed onto the ground.
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