In the silent night, the gale arrived suddenly and violently. At first, Cheng Li did not wake up. It was only when a massive rock slammed onto the tin roof of their shack with a deafening bang that all three of them were jolted awake.
“What happened?” Cheng Li asked.
Yuan Mu immediately took a defensive stance, ears sharply alert. A few seconds later, he answered, “The wind picked up.”
Cheng Li heard it too. The wind howled through the darkness like wolves wailing and ghosts shrieking. Sand and stones flew everywhere, and from time to time came thunderous crashes. She had no idea whether someone’s house had been smashed apart or collapsed entirely.
Uncle Zhao got to his feet and went to the creaking iron door to check whether it had been shut properly. Then he looked up at the metal roof overhead. “This wind’s way too strong.”
He was worried the tin roof might get ripped clean off.
Yuan Mu also lifted his head toward the roof. Back then, they had deliberately reinforced the walls, but when it came to the roof, he truly had not been able to think of any good solution.
Honestly, having a roof at all was already fortunate enough.
A lot of the nearby shelters did not even have roofs, only four bare walls.
“It should be fine. I reinforced it when I built it,” Cheng Li said confidently, secretly using her ability to control the metal sheets.
She yawned. “It’s just a bit of wind. Let’s go back to sleep.”
Yuan Mu looked at her speechlessly. With the commotion outside this intense, she thought it was just a bit of wind? If he had not heard wrong, those rumbling crashes were the sounds of houses collapsing.
Cheng Li yawned again. While sleeping earlier, she had spent the first half of the night busy modifying the “world,” and the second half sleeping especially soundly. Who would have thought she would get woken up again? Sleepy. Far too sleepy.
She flopped back onto the floor, controlling the metal sheets with part of her attention while continuing to sleep.
Bang bang bang!
Someone pounded on the iron door outside, shouting in a hoarse, tearing voice, “Open up! Hurry and open the door! Save us!”
Uncle Zhao looked toward Yuan Mu. “Probably people looking for shelter from the wind.”
Yuan Mu glanced at Cheng Li. Cheng Li rolled over. “You two decide.”
After a brief moment of thought, Yuan Mu said, “Let them in.”
Hearing his decision, Cheng Li was not surprised in the slightest. After all, he had once been a student of the First Military Academy.
Uncle Zhao opened the door. Wind and dust instantly rushed inside. Cheng Li only had time to shut her eyes and did not even manage to see who was outside.
It was only after Uncle Zhao closed the door again that she opened her eyes. Two men and one woman came into view.
Unfortunately, they were the very same people who had tried to steal her giant chunk of metal yesterday.
“Apologize,” Cheng Li said flatly.
The woman looked utterly bedraggled, and a flash of humiliation crossed her eyes. Reluctantly, she parted her lips. Her voice was as soft as the buzzing of a bee. “Sorry.”
Cheng Li clicked her tongue, about to say something, when the other two men bent at the waist and loudly said, “We’re sorry. We shouldn’t have tried to steal your stuff yesterday. Also, thank you for letting us come in and take shelter.”
The corner of Cheng Li’s mouth twitched. Two grown men were more flexible and able to bend than one little woman. What else could she even say?
“You tried to rob her?” Yuan Mu said coolly, killing intent flickering in his gaze as he looked at the two men and the woman.
“It was a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding.” The man forced a smile and carefully sized Yuan Mu up before hesitantly asking, “You’re Yuan Mu, the First Seat of the First Military Academy?”
Yuan Mu’s eyes turned even colder. “You know me?”
“I’ve seen photos of you. I also saw you once from afar during the Inter-Academy Tournament. The three of us are from the Second Military Academy,” the man explained. Without caring whether Yuan Mu wanted to know him or not, he proactively introduced himself. “My name’s Chu Feng, a third-year student at the Second Military Academy. He’s Hu Li, and she’s Li Shuixi. The three of us are classmates.”
When Hu Li and Li Shuixi heard Yuan Mu’s name, shock first flashed through their eyes before turning into admiration and regret.
“So he really did marry a one-armed woman,” Li Shuixi muttered quietly.
Cheng Li: “?”
The wind continued to howl outside, showing every sign of growing fiercer by the minute. Then the door was pounded again with loud bangs, shattering the awkward atmosphere inside the shack.
This time, Uncle Zhao did not ask questions and opened the door directly.
People continuously poured in from outside, instantly cramming the small shack to the brim. Cheng Li had no choice but to stand up. She pressed shoulder to shoulder with Yuan Mu against the wall, one hand raised protectively above him.
“Move in a little more! We need to get inside too!”
“There’s no room left! If we squeeze any more people in, the house’ll collapse!”
“Hey, hey, pull me in! The wind’s about to blow me away!”
“There’s really no more space! Why don’t you go to the mine tunnels?”
“No way! We’ll get blown away and smashed to death by rocks and debris before we even make it to the tunnels!”
“There’s nothing we can do about it! Look for yourselves, it’s already full!”
“The hell with that. I’m getting in no matter what.”
Crack!
It sounded like something splitting apart.
The people trying to force their way inside suddenly froze, stopping in their tracks.
“You should link arms and move together. You can probably make it to the mine tunnels that way,” someone suggested.
The group gritted their teeth. “Fine, then we’ll head to the mine tunnels.”
The door closed once more, shutting the raging wind outside.
With so many people crammed into one room, and every single one of them having gone more than ten days without bathing since being kidnapped, the smell was imaginable enough.
The stench made Cheng Li dizzy. She lowered her head to look at Yuan Mu, and her mood instantly balanced out again. There was a sentinel here with heightened senses. Wouldn’t he have it even worse?
Yuan Mu truly did have it worse. Acid was already surging up his throat. At this moment, he would rather go outside and get blasted by the wind than stay here packed together like sardines.
Subconsciously, he turned his face toward Cheng Li.
The tip of his nose brushed against her waist.
Thump, thump, thump!
His heart suddenly pounded violently several times.
For reasons even he himself did not understand, Yuan Mu remained frozen in that position.
Hm?
What was that scent?
It smelled exactly like fresh grass after the rain.
And the source of that scent was…
Yuan Mu took several deep breaths, an indescribable look appearing in his eyes. They were all people who had not bathed, so why was the difference between people so enormous?
It never occurred to Yuan Mu to associate the scent with pheromones. Setting aside the fact that Cheng Li was already eighteen, making the possibility of differentiation incredibly slim, even if she had differentiated, she would most likely become a sentinel rather than a precious guide. And if it were a sentinel’s pheromones, his first reaction would have been rejection and discomfort, not like now, where he wanted nothing more than to breathe in more of it.
The wind raged for most of the night. Cheng Li grew so sleepy from standing that she nearly drifted off several times. Her legs had long since gone numb, yet her single arm stubbornly remained raised above Yuan Mu protectively.
Meanwhile, Yuan Mu leaned sideways against her, his face buried at her waist, sleeping soundly.
“The wind stopped!”
Someone suddenly shouted, instantly jolting the half-asleep crowd awake.
“There’s no sound anymore. I think it really stopped.”
“Open the door, open the damn door! I’m getting out. Fuck, so many people crammed together, it reeks in here.”
“If it stinks so much, why’d you squeeze in here in the first place? Being alive’s already good enough, so stop bitching!”
……..
The tottering iron door swung open, and the people inside rushed out in a swarm.
Yuan Mu also opened his eyes. The moment he noticed his posture, his heart once again began pounding uncontrollably. He calmly shifted away as if nothing had happened, secretly thankful that he was covered head to toe in dust so nobody could see how red and hot his face and ears had become.
Out of the corner of his eye, he glanced at Cheng Li. Seeing her shaking out her arm and kicking her legs, completely normal, he quietly let out a breath of relief.
Yet for some reason, he also felt a faint sense of disappointment.
Chu Feng, Hu Li, and Li Shuixi lingered until the very end. The three of them looked hesitant to speak, until Chu Feng was finally shoved forward. He looked at Cheng Li, then at Yuan Mu, and cautiously asked, “Can we work together with you guys from now on?”
Yuan Mu said nothing. Cheng Li raised a brow and gave a lazy hum. “Sure.”
“And if, I mean if, you two have any plans, you absolutely have to bring us along,” Chu Feng said, eyes blazing brightly.
Hu Li and Li Shuixi also stared nervously at Yuan Mu and Cheng Li.
The corner of Cheng Li’s mouth twitched. She rolled her eyes. “Brother, we’re disabled.”
“But you’re extraordinary disabled people,” Chu Feng blurted out.
Hu Li and Li Shuixi nodded frantically. “If we work together, we’ll definitely figure something out.”
Cheng Li: “?” Where exactly was all this confidence coming from?