[GL] I'm Just A Side Character... So Why Is The Heroine Chasing Me?!-Chapter 61: So cute!

The morning before the quarterfinal match, Lan Yue found a plum blossom on her windowsill.

It was fresh. Pale pink, still holding dew, placed precisely in the center of the ledge where it could not have blown in by accident. The stem had been cut cleanly with a blade, not snapped, which meant someone had taken the time to do it properly.

Lan Yue picked it up and held it like it was made of glass.

She tucked it into her hair before she could think about why, and spent the rest of the morning pretending she had not done that.

At the training grounds, she found Zhao Lingxi practicing alone. Not the intense, isolated sessions of the previous week. Lighter. Controlled. The ice formations she conjured were delicate, almost decorative, spiraling upward like frozen calligraphy before dissolving into mist.

Lan Yue sat on the stone bench at the edge of the ground and watched. She did not announce herself. She did not need to. Zhao Lingxi’s forms shifted slightly the moment she arrived, angling three degrees toward the bench. A tiny adjustment. The kind of thing only someone who had spent months memorizing Zhao Lingxi’s body language would notice.

She was performing for Lan Yue. Not consciously. Not deliberately. The way a musician plays differently when they know someone is listening.

Lan Yue’s chest ached in a way that had nothing to do with pain.

When Zhao Lingxi finished, she walked to the bench and sat down. Not across from Lan Yue. Beside her. Close enough that their sleeves nearly touched. The same careful distance as the corridor two nights ago, precise, intentional, leaving a gap small enough to feel charged but large enough to retreat through.

They sat in silence. It was not the silence of the past week, heavy and suffocating and full of things unsaid. It was lighter. Fragile, like new ice on a spring pond. The kind of silence two people share when they are both trying to figure out who should speak first.

Lan Yue decided to be brave.

"The plum blossom," she said. "Was that you?"

Zhao Lingxi did not look at her. "There is a plum tree near the east wall. The blossoms have been opening early this year."

"That does not answer my question."

"It does if you think about it."

Lan Yue bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling. This was familiar. This was the Zhao Lingxi she knew, the one who answered questions sideways and let you assemble the meaning yourself.

"Thank you," Lan Yue said. "It is beautiful."

Zhao Lingxi’s gaze moved to Lan Yue’s hair, where the blossom was tucked behind her left ear. She looked at it for exactly two seconds, then looked away. The tips of her ears were pink. Faintly. Almost imperceptibly. But Lan Yue had spent months cataloguing this woman’s face, and she would bet her entire spatial storage on the fact that Zhao Lingxi’s ears were blushing.

The red thread on her wrist pulsed warm. Not the tentative flicker of last night. A real pulse. Steady.

They sat together for a long time. The morning sun climbed above the training ground walls and turned the frost on the grass into glitter. A bird landed on the railing nearby, looked at both of them, and flew away like it had decided not to interrupt.

"Your research," Zhao Lingxi said eventually. "The thing you have been working on late at night. Is it dangerous?"

Lan Yue hesitated. She could not tell Zhao Lingxi about Qin Wen’s pills. Not yet. Not until they had the evidence secured. If Zhao Lingxi confronted him directly, everything would collapse.

"Somewhat," she said carefully.

"That means yes."

"It means somewhat."

Zhao Lingxi turned to look at her. Full on. No angles, no sidelong glances, no studying her from behind the shield of peripheral vision. She looked at Lan Yue the way she used to, with that quiet, focused attention that made the rest of the world go soft around the edges.

"Be careful," she said.

Two words. But she said them the way other people said whole speeches. Lan Yue felt each one land in her chest and settle there like warm stones.

"I will," Lan Yue said. Her voice came out smaller than she intended.

Zhao Lingxi held her gaze for another second, then stood. She brushed invisible dust from her robes, adjusted her sleeves, and turned to leave. Three steps away, she paused.

"The robes," she said without turning around. "Did they fit?"

Lan Yue’s face went hot. "You could have left a note."

"A note would have been excessive."

"A note would have been normal."

"I am not normal. You know this."

She walked away. Lan Yue sat on the bench, face burning, and realized she was smiling so hard her cheeks hurt.

That afternoon, she found Tang Xiaoli in the alchemy hall and recounted the entire morning in excruciating detail while Tang Xiaoli made increasingly loud squeaking noises.

"She left you a flower," Tang Xiaoli said, gripping Lan Yue’s arm. "An actual flower. On your windowsill. At dawn. That is the most romantic thing I have ever heard and I once read a novel where a sword cultivator carved his beloved’s name into a mountain."

"It is not romantic. It is a plum blossom. They grow on trees."

"Everything grows on trees. That does not mean picking one at dawn and placing it on someone’s windowsill is not romantic." 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

"She was probably just passing by."

"At dawn. Past your window. With a cutting blade."

Lan Yue opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"I do not know what we are," she said finally. "We spent a week not speaking. I said something terrible to her. She shut me out completely. And now she is leaving flowers and asking if I sleep enough and sitting close enough that I can smell her hair, and I do not know what any of it means."

Tang Xiaoli looked at her with the gentle exasperation of someone watching a person drown in ankle deep water.

"It means she is coming back, you enormous idiot."

That evening, Lan Yue decided to stop being a coward.

She found Zhao Lingxi in the library. Same table as before. Same scrolls. Same precise handwriting in the margins. But this time, when Lan Yue sat down across from her, Zhao Lingxi looked up.

"I need to say something," Lan Yue said.

"You often do."

"What I said that night. About you being like your family. It was the worst thing I have ever said to anyone, and I have said some truly terrible things in my life, including once telling a zombie to go eat someone with better taste."

Zhao Lingxi blinked. "You told a zombie..."

"Not the point. The point is that I was wrong. Completely, absolutely, catastrophically wrong. You are nothing like them. You have never been anything like them. I said it because I was scared and jealous and confused, and none of those things are your fault."

She paused. Took a breath.

"I am not asking you to forgive me. I am asking you to know that I see you. The real you. And I would rather stand outside your walls for the rest of my life than ever make you feel like you need them because of me."

The library was quiet. Dust motes floated in the lamplight. A scroll that had been balanced on the edge of the table chose that exact moment to roll off and hit the floor with a soft thud that sounded deafening in the silence.

Zhao Lingxi stared at her. The mask was gone. Not lowered. Not cracked. Gone. And underneath it was an expression Lan Yue had never seen before, open and startled and almost fragile.

"Lan Yue," Zhao Lingxi said slowly. "I was not angry at you."

The words did not compute. Lan Yue’s brain received them, examined them, turned them over, and sent them back marked undeliverable.

"What?"

"I was not angry. I thought you were angry at me."

Lan Yue’s mouth opened. No sound came out. She looked like a fish that had been gently placed on a library table and asked to discuss its feelings.

"But..." she managed. "But you did not speak to me for a week."

"Because you left our room. You walked out. I thought you finally realized that being close to me was not worth the cost, and I was giving you the space to leave properly."

"But... but the cold treatment. The tea I brought you. You did not even look at me."

"I did not want you to see my face. I was afraid if you saw how much it affected me you would stay out of guilt rather than choice."

Lan Yue stared. Her brain was attempting to reprocess five days of agony through an entirely new lens and the results were causing something very close to a system failure.

"But... you sat across from me at breakfast and said nothing. You walked past me without touching. You were so... polite."

"I was trying not to cry."

The sentence landed in the silence like a pebble into a deep well. Lan Yue heard it hit the bottom.

"You were trying not to cry," she repeated.

"Yes."

"For five days."

"Six, technically. The first night was the worst."

Lan Yue pressed both hands flat against the table because the room had started doing something strange and tilting slightly to the left. "Let me understand this. I thought you hated me. You thought I was leaving you. We were both miserable for six days because neither of us bothered to say one sentence."

"It would appear so."

"One sentence. ’Are you angry at me?’ That is all either of us had to say."

"In hindsight, yes."

"Zhao Lingxi."

"Lan Yue."

"We are both disasters."

The corner of Zhao Lingxi’s mouth twitched. Not a polite curve. Not a measured almost smile. A real, genuine, barely suppressed twitch that was fighting to become a laugh.

"I am aware," she said.

Lan Yue slumped forward and pressed her forehead against the table. She made a sound that was halfway between a groan and a laugh, muffled by the wooden surface.

"Six days," she said into the table. "I slept nine hours total. Tang Xiaoli force fed me buns. Bai Xuelan made me cry with a metaphor about swords. Mo Tian brought me tea and called me a glacier."

"I broke a teacup the first night."

Lan Yue lifted her head. "I heard that. Through the door. I thought you were angry."

"I was holding it too tightly because I was trying not to come after you."

They stared at each other across the library table, two women who had spent nearly a week drowning in identical pain from opposite sides of the same wall, and the absurdity of it settled over them like a warm, ridiculous blanket.

Lan Yue started laughing. She could not help it. It bubbled up from somewhere deep and unstoppable, the kind of laughter that comes when the tension breaks so completely that the only response left is to fall apart.

Zhao Lingxi watched her laugh. And slowly, like sunrise, the tension in her shoulders released. Her posture softened. Her eyes warmed. And the faintest, rarest, most beautiful smile Lan Yue had ever seen settled onto her face and stayed there.

The red thread between them blazed. Not flickered. Not pulsed. Blazed, warm and bright and alive, humming against both their wrists like a heartbeat that had been holding its breath for six days and finally, finally remembered how to beat.

Zhao Lingxi reached across the table. She picked up the scroll that had fallen, set it aside, and placed her hand in the empty space between them. Palm up. Open. Not reaching. Just there.

Lan Yue looked at the hand. Looked at Zhao Lingxi. Looked at the hand again.

She placed her fingers over Zhao Lingxi’s palm. Gently. Like setting down something infinitely precious.

Zhao Lingxi’s fingers closed around hers. Warm despite the ice affinity. Steady despite everything.

Neither of them let go for a very long time.