Under the colored lanterns, the lake water shimmered, ripples spreading outward in circle after circle. Lovers on the boats whispered their affections to one another, accompanied by the gentle evening breeze, tranquil and beautiful.
However, this beauty was now abruptly interrupted.
Fu Yi instinctively searched behind her for Ye Xunshu’s figure. But there were too many people on the platform; not only had it taken immense effort to squeeze her way in, but the crowd had begun to panic the moment they heard someone had fallen into the water.
People jostled one another on the platform, and chaos instantly erupted.
She heard someone scream again, “Someone else fell in! Stop pushing!”
“How did they just fall in like that?”
“Quick, find someone who can swim!”
“Get some poles or something to grab onto!”
The platform was in the middle of the lake, with nothing on it but colored lanterns. Fu Yi’s heart tightened; the voices made it sound like people near the edge of the platform were the ones falling.
She didn’t even have time to take a prayer lantern before desperately trying to fight her way out.
“Stop pushing! Stop pushing!”
The center of the lake was suddenly deafening with noise. The crowd surged, and with many Alphas taller than her in the way, she couldn’t see where Ye Xunshu was at all.
“Xunshu! Xunshu!” Fu Yi didn’t know if she was simply oversensitive when it came to Ye Xunshu, but that fleeting scent of osmanthus she thought she’d caught earlier left her in a state of sheer panic.
In this situation, she couldn’t calm down.
“Who fell in?” Cold sweat broke out across Fu Yi’s back. The scent of late-blooming lotuses in the air seemed to transform into the smell of osmanthus.
Someone on the outer edge shouted, “It’s a woman who fell in! Whose family is she from?”
“She fell off a boat!”
Fu Yi panicked. She grabbed a random person, her voice cracking with loss of control. “Is it Ye Xunshu?”
The man was startled by her. He trembled with fear and couldn’t say a word. Someone who appeared to be his partner stepped out, pulled him into an embrace, and roared at Fu Yi, “Who knows who you’re talking about? Go see for yourself!”
Fu Yi shuddered. Drawing from some unknown reservoir of strength, she fought against the direction of the crowd and managed to squeeze her way to the outer edge.
She scanned the area quickly. She didn’t see their boat, and she didn’t see Ye Xunshu.
Because the commotion was so large, many people from the market had also gathered around, causing the soldiers coming to the rescue to be stuck in a bottleneck, unable to reach the scene.
Meanwhile, the people on the platform were busy protecting their own partners; few were willing to jump into the water.
“Which family’s Omega is recklessly releasing pheromones? There are so many people here, pull it back!”
It was unclear who had lost control of their pheromones due to the fright, but the scent in the air was becoming increasingly complex.
There were too many people, and the light from the lanterns wasn’t enough to illuminate the entire lake. In the chaos, Fu Yi heard a voice from nowhere: “Sister!”
Her heart trembled, and a chill ran down her spine. She shed her outer coat and jumped into the water without hesitation.
“Ah, someone jumped in!”
The summer night lake water felt icy the moment it touched her skin. Fu Yi surfaced, searching for Ye Xunshu among the many figures in the water.
“Xunshu!” Fu Yi couldn’t tell which of them was Ye Xunshu. She swam toward the figures, but as she got closer, she realized none of them were the person she sought. “Xunshu!”
“Over there!”
Someone shouted. Fu Yi blinked away the water clinging to her eyes. Her vision wasn’t clear, but that person’s silhouette looked somewhat similar to Ye Xunshu’s. In that frantic state, Fu Yi took a breath and swam over to save them.
That person couldn’t swim and eventually stopped struggling after a few splashes.
Fu Yi grabbed blindly underwater and pulled the person to the shore. But once she wiped the water from her eyes and looked, the person wasn’t Ye Xunshu at all.
Where was she?
Fu Yi turned back to the lake. The soldiers had already entered the water to rescue the others.
The small boats rocked unsteadily on the lake, many of them empty.
But she couldn’t find Ye Xunshu.
Fu Yi sat on the bank, soaked to the bone. Lake water slid down her stray hairs and dropped precisely into her eyes.
As if startled, she instinctively closed her eyes.
“Cough, cough.”
The lake water burned her throat. She had been in such a rush to save someone that she had swallowed several mouthfuls.
“Miss, you should go change.”
Someone tapped Fu Yi on the shoulder, but the person stopped mid-sentence.
Fu Yi looked back, only to see the person covering their nose and mouth, looking at her with a mix of horror and fear.
Fu Yi: “What is?”
She reached up to brush her wet hair back. Her fingertips accidentally brushed against her neck, and her entire body went stiff.
At the same time, the temperature of her body began to rise.
The person retreated several steps, looking at her and barely able to speak. “Miss, you, you shouldn’t.”
“I.”
The words caught in her throat. Fu Yi was speechless.
The suppression patch was gone. It must have fallen off while she was in the water.
What should she do?
Fu Yi instinctively backed away from the people on the shore, but the lake was behind her; she had nowhere to retreat.
There were too many people here, a chaotic mix of Alphas and Omegas. She had to find a place to hide.
But Ye Xunshu?
Fu Yi stood frozen, lost as to what to do. She still hadn’t found Ye Xunshu. How did she lose her again?
The scent diffusing through the air had changed at some point. It now carried the scent of a sea breeze, her own pheromones.
Her body was becoming uncontrollably feverish. Fu Yi’s fingertips trembled as she looked at the people around her.
There was no way out.
Reason told her she should run. With so many people around, if she triggered an Omega’s heat, she would lose control of herself even more.
But her body refused to move. She had to find her little rabbit.
“Sister.”
Fu Yi wondered if she was hallucinating due to extreme stress and fear; that “Sister” sounded exactly like Ye Xunshu’s voice. She raised her head and looked in that direction.
The scent of osmanthus became gradually clearer.
Fu Yi saw her little rabbit walking toward her, completely unharmed.
Fu Yi’s first thought was: Ye Xunshu is going into heat.
“Xunshu, you,” Fu Yi stared at her blankly, unable to snap out of her daze. “You, you didn’t fall into the water?”
“Of course Xunshu didn’t fall in.” There were traces of water in her clear, bright eyes, the corners of which were slightly red. Her voice held an irrepressible hoarseness. “But Sister, how did you get so wet?”
Before she could finish, she reached out toward Fu Yi, her voice hoarse and cold: “Let’s go.”
The cameraman had long since been lost in the earlier chaos. Fu Yi let Ye Xunshu lead her away. In that moment, she felt the person before her possessed a kind of magic.
She led her through the bustling crowd. Perhaps because of the pheromones on both of them, the crowd automatically parted to create a path.
Fu Yi looked down at where their hands touched. It wasn’t the first time they had held hands, but this time, her heart was beating incredibly fast.
Was it the pheromones?
The noise of the crowd grew distant. The person in front of her walked neither fast nor slow, leading her safely out of that place at the most comfortable pace.
The little rabbit before her eyes was no longer a rabbit in that instant.
Fu Yi felt herself drifting further from the familiar “rabbit,” yet getting closer and closer to the Ye Xunshu before her. She couldn’t say where this dazed illusion came from.
The colored lanterns on both sides still shone with the light unique to tonight. A fine drizzle fell, creating dense ripples on the lake, urgent yet gentle, as if suddenly returning to the tranquility under the moonlight.
The neon light refracted into seven colors, and the cloying, sweet scent of osmanthus lingered at the tip of her nose, impossible to ignore.
On this late summer night, the “water crystals” hit the lush trees, using the chill to quietly turn half of the green on the roadside maple leaves into red.
In this moment, Fu Yi thought of nothing else.
Regardless of whether Ye Xunshu was a rabbit or not, she was the person she had officially married and the one she would protect well from now on.