The ice wall had lost most of its magic support over time and had melted away… The group found the lowest part of the wall and made a human ladder to lift Liu Huiying, the lightest of them, over it…
“Yueye… Yueye…!?” Liu Huiying anxiously poked the little girl’s cheek, trying to wake her… No one knew what had happened. When Liu Huiying came in, she found Yueye lying there all alone, half-conscious and **… So, as the first one to climb over, she didn’t call for anyone else to follow…
“Cold… so cold…” Yueye murmured in her sleep. She seemed to be having a nightmare, curling unconsciously into a tight ball…
“Cough… cough, cough…” Yueye’s violent coughing was followed by her suddenly opening her pale blue eyes, before Liu Huiying could even react… For some reason, Liu Huiying felt there was something different about those eyes now… Something frightening…
“Are you okay…?” Liu Huiying asked, sounding a little worried…
“I’m so cold…” Yueye wrapped her arms around herself, her little face hidden behind her knees. She looked completely panicked, as if she’d been forced to endure all sorts of terrible things… She didn’t respond to Liu Huiying at all…
“…Su Lin, exchange some thicker clothes for Yueye.” Seeing the lifeless look in Yueye’s eyes, Liu Huiying couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. She shouted to the people outside the wall… They were curious about what had happened inside, but did as she asked…
And so Yueye changed into an autumn outfit… The puffy clothes swallowed her whole. Even her face was hidden beneath the hood… The only things anyone could see were two tufts of blue hair…
“Looks like the system changed her clothes automatically… Why’d it make them so huge…?” Yueye had changed outfits in an instant, which even surprised Zhu Yue… The system had said that exchanged clothes could be customized in style and size, but Zhu Yue had never seen the exchange happen like this before…
“Are you feeling any better…?” Zhu Yue looked at the little girl in the blue hood and couldn’t help feeling guilty… After all, she was one of the people responsible for things ending up this way… The best news she had was that Yueye was still alive. She didn’t have the courage to find out about anything worse…
“Mm…” Yueye’s face was hidden beneath her hood, making it impossible to read her expression… Zhu Yue had a feeling that the Yueye before her wasn’t the same Yueye as before. Her presence was so cold and distant… as if she belonged to another world.
There was no time to worry about anything else. Liu Huiying’s first thought was to get Yueye out of the ring of ice walls… But Yueye had no strength left, so they couldn’t use the same way to get out…
“Then we’ll smash our way out.” Su Lin had already been thinking about how to get the two of them out. The ruby-red light of the fiery longsword in his hand flashed as he swung it hard at the wall…
“Boom! Boom! Boom!” Three explosive crashes rang out, and a small hole was forcibly opened in the ice wall…
“Yueye… I owe you my life.” As Yueye crawled out through the hole, Su Lin looked at her trembling beneath her hood and spoke, his heart full of guilt…
“…” Yueye said nothing. She didn’t even want to acknowledge Su Lin. In her heart, she no longer trusted humans…
“Yueye… you weren’t…?” Seeing Yueye’s state, Zhu Yue suddenly thought of another horrifying possibility… After all, the books all said dragons were lustful by nature…
“…No.” Yueye finally spoke. Just two simple words, but they carried a faint chill…
“…Then what did that giant dragon want with you?” Su Lin tried to find a topic that might get her talking…
“I don’t know…” Yueye stood up from the ground. Su Lin still couldn’t see her face beneath the hood…
“You don’t know?”
“Mm… I don’t know…” As Yueye spoke, she tucked her hands into her sleeves… No one noticed the bluish-green scales that had just appeared on the back of her hand…
“I passed out after you left…” Yueye tugged at her collar, cleverly covering the last patch of bare skin on her neck… It seemed like she was deliberately hiding something…
It was hard to tell whether Yueye’s strange movements had caught Su Lin’s attention… or whether he’d simply been looking for a topic to bring up.
“Uh, why’d you order clothes this oversized…?” Su Lin asked, pretending not to care…
“Wasn’t it you who ordered them?” Liu Huiying had been wondering from the start who had ordered clothes so absurdly oversized. She’d assumed it was Su Lin, since he had no idea what Yueye’s build was like…
“It wasn’t me. I didn’t know her size, so I just gave Yueye the access. I only paid the exchange points…” Su Lin shrugged, making it clear he wasn’t taking the blame…
“Because I was cold…” Yueye didn’t say anything more. Maybe she could no longer trust the people in front of her… Or maybe it was because she knew her body was undergoing a drastic change…
“All right. Let’s find somewhere to camp for tonight. We can talk about everything else later, okay, Yueye?” When Su Lin realized she didn’t want to talk to him at all, he gave up trying to force a conversation and changed the subject…
“Mm.” Yueye’s reply was still ice-cold…
Every now and then, the only thing visible beneath the hood was the faint outline of her cute little mouth… But even that little mouth showed no emotion, leaving everyone guessing what Yueye was thinking…
“Sigh…” Seeing that Yueye had no intention of forgiving him, Su Lin took the hint and walked away… He didn’t try to talk to her again.
What he couldn’t see were the pale blue scales faintly appearing beneath Yueye’s skin… Yueye seemed to have expected this to happen. The oversized clothes she’d exchanged for looked as if they’d been prepared for the changes her body was going through now…
