Chapter 61: Awakening 2
Beneath the dim sky cloaked in twilight haze, the forest lay in eerie silence, its calm shattered by the ruins of a shattered carriage. Broken wheels, splintered wood, and pools of dried blood painted a grim picture—one that could have easily been mistaken for the aftermath of a demonic beast attack.
In the center of that scorched and shattered clearing, amid the broken wreckage of what had once been a carriage, a lone figure knelt upon the charred earth.
Her slender form trembled like a dying flame in the wind.
Ash clung to her torn robes, and her long black hair, once neatly tied, now hung messily around her face, dirtied by soot and blood. Her delicate frame looked pitiful, almost ghostly, amidst the wreckage. Yet, in the silence of the burnt-out forest, it was her quiet sobs that pierced the air with the sharpest sorrow.
Tears—warm, heavy, and unrelenting—streamed down her bloodstreaked cheeks, falling silently onto the blackened soil. The ground drank her grief without protest, as if the world itself acknowledged her anguish.
That girl was Li Yao, once proud and fiery, but now reduced to a fragile figure crumbling beneath the weight of loss.
Her body bore clear signs of the recent chaos—bruises mottled her arms, and her robe was ripped along the sides, exposing patches of pale skin marred by scrapes and wounds. Her forehead had split open where she’d struck a jagged rock after being thrown from the carriage, and blood had dried down the side of her face in a cruel trail.
Yet despite the physical torment, it was the invisible wound—lodged in her heart—that shattered her more than anything else.
"I... lost him..."
Her voice emerged like a dying breath, hoarse and barely audible, cracking under the weight of despair.
Her hand reached forward, trembling, to clutch at a half-burnt plank from the ruined carriage—the last remnant of the moment she had shared with him. Her fingers, once graceful and proud, now curled weakly around the splintered wood as if trying to hold onto something already gone.
Her lips parted again, trembling as if to cry out.