This task naturally fell to Li Muchen.
Lin Manqing did not refuse.
Li Muchen hailed a taxi by the roadside, but to his surprise, there were very few empty cabs at this hour, and after waiting for a long time, none appeared.
Watching Li Muchen wave his hand continuously, Lin Manqing smiled and asked, "Don't you have DiDi?"
Li Muchen paused. "DiDi? My younger brother? Of course I do."
"Then use it."
"Huh? Use him right now?"
Li Muchen's expression was utterly exaggerated, as if he had just seen a monster.
Lin Manqing seemed to realize something as well and explained, "The DiDi I'm talking about is used for calling a taxi."
"What?" No matter how hard Li Muchen tried, he could not figure out how one was supposed to use a younger brother to catch a ride.
Lin Manqing glanced at her phone and said, "Never mind."
Li Muchen continued to reach out and flag down cars.
Lin Manqing suggested, "Why don't you walk me back instead?"
"Walk back?" Li Muchen looked down at Lin Manqing's feet. "It's this far—can you manage the walk?"
"I can manage." With that, Lin Manqing started walking forward, then suddenly turned back with a radiant smile. "I take aerobics, you know. This little distance is nothing."
What kind of exercise was aerobics?
Li Muchen shook his head and stepped forward to follow her.
"Why did you hand Ding Xiang over to me back then?" Lin Manqing asked suddenly.
"Because I don't trust anyone else," Li Muchen said.
"You trust me?" Lin Manqing looked at Li Muchen.
"I do." Li Muchen showed not the slightest hesitation.
"Why?" Lin Manqing was curious.
"No particular reason. Trusting someone is just like love at first sight—there are no reasons." A slightly cynical smile played on Li Muchen's face.
Lin Manqing was slightly taken aback before bursting into a giggle. "What kind of reason is that?"
"I told you, there's no reason."
"Who was that on the phone just now?"
"Hmm?"
"That phone call that made Uncle Ming let you guys go."
"Oh, just a friend."
Knowing that Li Muchen wouldn't reveal who it was, Lin Manqing didn't press further and simply looked at him with curiosity. "Suppose there hadn't been that phone call—what would you have done?"
Li Muchen smiled. "You were there, weren't you?"
"What use am I? Uncle Ming didn't give me any face."
"How could that be?" Li Muchen said. "Uncle Ming was definitely going to give you face; he was just looking for a way to back down gracefully. My phone call merely added a bit of weight to make him make up his mind faster."
Half-convinced, Lin Manqing suddenly stared at Li Muchen. "Did you know who I was all along?"
Li Muchen shook his head.
"No, you definitely knew," Lin Manqing said, tilting her head in thought. "You asked me just now if I could walk this far because it's so far. But I never told you where I live—how did you know whether my home was far or not? You handed Ding Xiang to me because you knew my identity, and Ding Xiang would be safe as long as she was with me. That's why you were so certain Uncle Ming would give me face."
Li Muchen had to admit that this fiancée of his was quite smart.
Smart, kind, and responsible—she was very different from Madam Lin.
Yet he had no intention of revealing his identity, because he had come precisely to call off the engagement, and the Lin Family didn't seem to welcome him anyway.
"Uncle Ming didn't give me face—he only gave face to the person on your phone," Lin Manqing looked at Li Muchen with curiosity. "Just who are you?"
"My name is Li Muchen, and I come from the mountains."
"Are you really from the mountains?" Lin Manqing still found it a bit hard to believe.
"Yes."
"Then tell me which mountain."
"Kunlun."
"Tsk, what next, a snow mountain?" Lin Manqing believed him even less now.
Li Muchen said, "Kunlun is so vast that many parts are indeed covered in snow year-round, but our Tiandu Peak has no snow. That's because there is a Ten Thousand Immortals Sword Formation at the summit that emits sword qi all year round, even more scorching than sunlight."
Seeing that his stories were getting more and more outrageous, Lin Manqing simply stopped talking to him.
Once the conversation stopped, the atmosphere turned rather strange.
The two of them walked in silence through the late-night streets of Hecheng.
"Aren't your family worried about you staying out this late?" Li Muchen asked.
"They don't know I'm back in Hecheng today."
"You didn't tell them when you came home?"
"If I told them, they'd send a driver to pick me up, and I wouldn't have an ounce of freedom."
"So you're walking home now just to stretch out these few free moments?"
Lin Manqing gave a sly smile. "You saw right through me."
"Then shouldn't you pay me a hush money fee?" Li Muchen joked.
To his surprise, Lin Manqing readily agreed. "Then let me treat you to a late-night snack. How does that place look?"
Following the direction Lin Manqing pointed, Li Muchen saw a smoky, chaotic area ahead packed with late-night food stalls, two of which were billowing smoke from barbecue grills.
"Sure." It had been a long time since Li Muchen last had Hecheng's late-night street food.
They found a table and sat down, ordered a few dozen skewers, and called for a pitcher of beer.
At that moment, two men in plaid T-shirts sat down at the table right next to them.
Li Muchen had noticed long ago that these two men had been following them the entire way.
Chapter 19: Like a Drift of Fragrant Snow
The flavor of the roadside food stall made Li Muchen feel as if he had returned to his childhood.
Back then, the streets were not nearly as neat and clean, but they were much livelier than now, with snack stalls like this everywhere.
Ma Shan, Ding Xiang, and Li Muchen used to sit on the curbs, watching the diners from afar.
They couldn't afford to eat, but even just smelling the food was a form of satisfaction.
Ma Shan would often smack his lips and say, "When I grow up, I'm going to make a lot of money and eat barbecue every single day!"
Children were so simple—even after being tainted by society and learning that they needed to make money, all they could think about was eating barbecue.
Seeing Li Muchen staring blankly, Lin Manqing started playing on her phone.
Coming back to his senses, Li Muchen curiously leaned in to take a look.
With a snap, Lin Manqing slammed her phone face down onto the table. "How can you peek at my WeChat?"
"Is this what you guys call WeChat?"
"You really don't know how to use a smartphone?"
Li Muchen blankly shook his head.
After a moment of thought, Lin Manqing said, "Wait here."
She stood up, crossed the street, and walked into the shopping mall opposite.
Li Muchen saw the two men at the neighboring table stand up as well. Seeing that he didn't move, one of them sat back down while the other followed after her.
Li Muchen deduced that these two fellows must have been targeting Lin Manqing.
He pretended not to notice and lowered his head to drink his beer.
After a short while, Lin Manqing returned carrying a bag.
The man who had been following her came back too and sat down at the adjacent table. The two men lowered their heads and muttered to each other.
"For you." Lin Manqing handed the bag to Li Muchen.
"What is it?"
"A phone."
Li Muchen took the bag, pulled out an exquisite phone box, and opened it to reveal a large-screen smartphone inside.
"What's the meaning of this?" he asked.
"I'm giving it to you," Lin Manqing said.
Li Muchen shook his head. "I don't know how to use it, and I have no use for it."
"I'll teach you how to use it. How could you possibly have no use for it?"
As she spoke, Lin Manqing took out the new phone, turned it on, and began teaching Li Muchen how to operate a smartphone.
Li Muchen was dumbfounded. Why was this gadget so complicated?
Over the past decade or more, he hadn't been completely cut off from the world up in the mountains; he occasionally went down to handle matters.
Yet he truly had never used a smartphone—not because he couldn't afford one, but because he had no use for it.
The only purpose a phone served him was contacting his fellow apprentices and various major sects when handling business.Back at the bar, when he said Zhou Xu could not afford to compensate him for breaking his phone, he wasn't boasting, because his phone stored the numbers of the sect leaders or primary contacts of all the major immortal sects.
The value of that contact list was something worldly wealth could not measure.
Through the process of teaching him, Lin Manqing finally believed that Li Muchen had indeed never touched a smartphone and remained utterly ignorant of many things in modern society.
"You wouldn't happen to be a time-traveler, would you?" Lin Manqing joked.
"What is time-travel?" Li Muchen asked.
Lin Manqing helplessly shook her head as she taught him the phone's applications and casually explained some basic common knowledge about modern society.
Li Muchen quickly grasped the basic functions of the phone, registered a WeChat account, and added Lin Manqing on WeChat.
The next difficult hurdle was that Li Muchen didn't know how to type.
Although he had learned Pinyin when he was young, facing an unfamiliar keyboard left him completely at a loss.
"This is too hard! Harder than cultivating immortality!" Li Muchen complained.
He had no choice but to use the handwriting feature, laboriously sending his very first WeChat message to Lin Manqing:
"Hello"
"This humble one is Li Muchen, please guide me (clasped fists)"
Seeing such an archaic style of conversation, written moreover in traditional Chinese characters, Lin Manqing couldn't help but burst into a giggle and replied with a message:
"I wouldn't dare (clasped fists)"
Thinking the conversation had ended there, she was surprised when Li Muchen sent yet another message:
"Do you have any enemies?"
Lin Manqing was startled and replied:
"No"
Followed by a "?"
She couldn't understand why Li Muchen would ask such a question. But as she watched him swipe and tap on his phone for a long time, another message came through:
"Don't go out alone to play at night in the future. Watch out for strange men."
Finding it all the more bizarre, Lin Manqing didn't reply and instead looked up at Li Muchen.
Li Muchen was still swiping and tapping on his screen, and another message arrived:
"You are too beautiful."
Lin Manqing never expected this fellow to flirt using such a method.
Though it was a very ordinary sentence, because of that archaic and cliché buildup, it achieved an unexpected effect.
If a man were to praise her like that to her face, she wouldn't feel a thing and might even find it repulsive.
Yet right now, a tiny spark of joy bloomed in her heart. The man sitting opposite her truly seemed out of touch with society, yet he wasn't a boring person at all.
As the eldest daughter of the Lin Family, most of the time when she went out she was picked up and dropped off by a private chauffeur, sometimes with bodyguards accompanying her.
She rarely had an opportunity like this, sitting alone at a roadside stall with a man eating late-night snacks, completely undisturbed by anyone else.
Only at this moment did Lin Manqing feel real and vibrant—
No longer just the "eldest miss" living within the confines of the Lin Family.
"Then do you count as a strange man?" Lin Manqing replied.
"Of course not. I'm your fiancé."
"Get lost!"
Lin Manqing pretended to be angry as she put down her phone, though she wasn't actually angry at all.
Yet Li Muchen seemed to take it seriously; he replied with a single character—"Fine"—and stood up and walked away.
For a moment, Lin Manqing froze in place, staring at Li Muchen's departing back, completely bewildered as to what had just happened.
Could he really not take a joke?
You were the one who started joking first!
Then a second thought crossed her mind: he came from the mountains, so perhaps he couldn't handle a word like "get lost."
*Sigh*, she really shouldn't have said that.
Lin Manqing felt a twinge of guilt and desperately wanted to call Li Muchen back and tell him: *Hey, I was just joking.*
Yet her pride as an eldest miss prevented the words from leaving her lips.
A sudden emptiness hollowed out her heart, as if she had lost something precious.
Her eyes grew hot, and she muttered to herself: *Fine, go if you want. Who cares about your company?*
Picking up her bag and phone, Lin Manqing walked down the street in the opposite direction of Li Muchen.
She didn't notice the two men at the neighboring table exchange glances before standing up and closely following behind her.
Crossing an intersection, a park lay ahead.
It was already late, and the square dance aunties had long since dispersed; only a few scattered people were still strolling through the park.
Lin Manqing walked into the park, where a river flowed alongside dimly lit paths with almost no pedestrians in sight.
At that moment, the two men suddenly appeared before her, blocking her path.
"Beauty, walking alone this late—aren't you feeling a bit lonely?" one of the men leered.
"What do you want?" Lin Manqing was startled.
"What else? To have you, of course!" The man's gaze swept unrestrainedly up and down Lin Manqing's body, finally lingering on her chest.
"Get away, or I'll call the police."
No sooner had Lin Manqing finished speaking than one of the men snatched the bag right out of her hand.
The man pulled her phone out of the bag and waved it in the air.
"Call them then! Let's see what you're going to call the police with. Why don't you call me your hubby instead? Hahaha!"
Horrified, Lin Manqing cried out, "Give me my bag back right now! I'm going to scream!"
"Alright, I'll give it back." The man extended the bag, dangling it in front of her.
Taking advantage of the moment, the other man clamped a hand over her mouth from behind.
Chapter 20: Gambling on Stone
Lin Manqing wanted to scream, but no sound came out, leaving only muffled whimpering noises.
The man's grip was powerful, and she couldn't break free.
The other man tossed the bag onto the ground, stepped up to her with an evil grin, and said, "Beauty, let us brothers have some fun tonight. As long as you serve us well, we promise not to hurt you."
With that, he formed his hands into claws and lunged forward.
Despair flooded Lin Manqing's heart.
Right at that moment, a voice echoed from behind her:
"Let her go!"
A surge of joy washed over Lin Manqing as she recognized Li Muchen's voice.
Both thugs were startled.
"Kid, mind your own business!"
One of the thugs pulled a folding knife from his pocket, the blade gleaming with a cold light under the dim streetlamp.
He had already recognized that the newcomer was the exact same guy who had been eating late-night snacks with the girl just moments ago.
"I'll say this one last time: let her go," Li Muchen said.
"Let her go?" The thug sneered wickedly. "You ruined master's good time, so master's gonna teach you a lesson today!"
The small blade spun around in his hand, performing flashy blade tricks.
Suddenly, however, a blur flashed before his eyes, and the knife in his hand somehow ended up in Li Muchen's grip.
Li Muchen was already right in front of him, his hand sweeping lightly across the thug's chest.
The thug flew backward, slamming into a tree with a heavy thump.
Sliding down the trunk, his heels had barely touched the ground and he hadn't even steadied himself when a sharp *thwack* sounded—the folding knife had pierced right into the tree trunk, grazing past his neck.
The hilt was still vibrating, emitting a buzzing hum.
The chill of the blade could still be felt against his skin.
Terrified, the thug didn't dare to make a single move.
The other thug released Lin Manqing and charged forward with a string of curses, swinging his fists.
Using a move of Tai Chi he had learned just today—*Single Whip*—Li Muchen sent him flying as well.
Realizing the situation had turned south and leaving their knife behind, the two thugs turned tail and bolted, fleeing in a pathetic panic into the dense shrubbery until they vanished from sight.
Lin Manqing clutched her bruised neck and coughed twice.
Li Muchen picked up the bag and phone from the ground, handed them to her, and asked, "Are you alright?"
Lin Manqing shook her head. "I'm fine. Thank you."
As she said thank you, her gaze carried a somewhat complicated expression.
"How did you... come back?"
Li Muchen smiled. "I never left."Bowl"Then just now..."
"I just walked away for a bit. I told you to be careful at night, especially around strange men, yet you still walked alone onto such a secluded path."
Perplexed, Lin Manqing said, "You seemed to know someone was going to..."
"Those two fellows followed you the entire way," Li Muchen said. "When we were eating barbecue, they were sitting at the table right next to us."
Recalling this, Lin Manqing remembered that there did seem to be two such men.
"Then why didn't you say anything sooner?"
"To catch a thief, you have to catch them in the act," Li Muchen said. "Besides, if you don't suffer a little hardship, how are you going to remember my words?"
"You jerk!" Lin Manqing fumed angrily.
With an innocent expression, Li Muchen said, "I saved you, so how am I a jerk? You're really hard to please."
"Who asked you to please me?" Lin Manqing rolled her eyes.
"Sigh," Li Muchen sighed. "You're this fierce before even marrying into the family; if you actually become my wife, I won't be able to handle it."
"Get lost!"
Finding his words increasingly absurd, Lin Manqing simply ignored him and angrily marched forward.
After taking a few steps, looking at the dim path and recalling what had just happened, a lingering sense of fear crept back into her.
There was not the slightest sound behind her.
This guy... surely he didn't leave again just because she said the word "get lost," did he?
Anxious, she spun around to check if Li Muchen was still there, only to discover that he was right behind her.
Because she whirled around so suddenly, the two of them ended up face to face, close enough to hear each other's breathing.
"Ah!" Startled, Lin Manqing took two steps back. "What are you doing?"
"What am I doing?" Li Muchen looked completely innocent.
"Why, why are you following so close?"
"Don't you like me following you? Then I'll leave."
Li Muchen turned as if to walk away.
"Hey, wait!" Lin Manqing called out.
"What is it now?" Li Muchen turned back to ask.
"Are you really leaving?"
"So do you want me to leave, or do you want me to follow?"
"I..." Lin Manqing bit her lower lip, looking deeply aggrieved.
Shaking his head, Li Muchen smiled. "Alright, let's go. I'll walk you home."
Softly murmuring an acknowledgment, Lin Manqing obediently followed behind Li Muchen.
Under the dim streetlamps along the winding, secluded path, insects chirped from the grass in overlapping waves.
For the first time, Lin Manqing felt that a summer night could be so beautiful.
And the man walking beside her gave her an extraordinary sense of security. The terror from earlier was completely swept away; blending with the summer insect chorus, her footsteps grew light and nimble.
As they were about to exit the park, Li Muchen suddenly asked, "Can you teach me how to use my younger brother?"
"What?" Lin Manqing paused, thinking she had misheard.
"I tried it just now," Li Muchen said, awkwardly rubbing the back of his head. "First time, and I really don't know how to use him."
"You... tried... just now?" Lin Manqing pointed at Li Muchen. "You..."
Unaware of why Lin Manqing's expression had turned so bizarre, Li Muchen said, "Why don't you help me do it?"
"Get lost!"
This time Lin Manqing was genuinely furious, and she resolved never to pay attention to this fellow ever again.
Li Muchen called out from behind, "Hey, if we don't catch a taxi, how am I supposed to walk you back? Are we really going to walk the whole way?"
Lin Manqing stopped in her tracks and whipped around. "What did you say? Catch a taxi?"
"Yeah, DiDi for a taxi—you said it yourself." Li Muchen shook the phone in his hand.
Lin Manqing stood frozen in place for a long time before finally failing to hold back her laughter. First came a muffled snort as she covered her mouth with her hand, and then, letting her hand drop entirely, she burst into unrestrained laughter.
This was undoubtedly the most uninhibited she had ever laughed in her entire life.