[GL] I'm Just A Side Character... So Why Is The Heroine Chasing Me?!-Chapter 56: Do I deserve your trust?

Three days passed. Zhao Lingxi did not speak to Lan Yue once.

Not a word. Not a glance. Not even the small, unconscious acknowledgments that strangers give each other when they pass in narrow corridors, the slight turn of a shoulder, the reflexive dip of the chin. Zhao Lingxi offered Lan Yue nothing. She moved through every shared space as if the air where Lan Yue stood was simply empty, a gap in the world that required no attention.

Lan Yue had been ignored before. In the apocalypse, in her old life as Bethany, she had gone days without another person looking her in the eye. She knew what invisibility felt like. It was survivable. Lonely, but survivable.

This was different. This was being invisible to the one person who had made her feel seen.

On the first morning, Lan Yue went to their shared quarters. She rehearsed sentences the entire walk there, arranging words in her mouth like someone stacking fragile dishes. I am sorry. I did not mean it. I was afraid and I said something terrible and I know it was unforgivable but please, please let me try.

She knocked.

Zhao Lingxi opened the door. She was already dressed, her hair pinned neatly, her robes without a single crease. Her face held the expression of someone answering a knock they had expected but did not care about. Mild. Patient. Empty.

"Yes?" she said.

The word was perfectly neutral. Not sharp. Not cold. Neutral in the way a closed window is neutral. You could stand outside it all day and it would never let you in, but it would never acknowledge that it was keeping you out, either.

"Can we talk?" Lan Yue said.

"Of course. What about?"

She asked it the way someone asks a shopkeeper about the price of salt. Functional. Detached. As if Lan Yue’s answer could not possibly contain anything that warranted genuine attention.

"About what I said. That night. Lingxi, I was wrong. I was terrified after what happened to Wen Hao, and I saw you with Qin Wen and my mind went to the worst place possible, and what came out of my mouth was not what I believe. I do not think you are like them. I have never thought that."

Zhao Lingxi listened. She did not interrupt. She did not react. She stood in the doorway with her hands folded in front of her and received every word with the same attentive blankness that she gave to sect announcements and weather reports.

When Lan Yue finished, the silence lasted three full seconds.

"Thank you for clarifying," Zhao Lingxi said. "I appreciate you taking the time."

Then she closed the door. Not slammed. Not pushed. Closed, with the careful, unhurried precision of someone filing away a document they would never read again.

Lan Yue stood in the corridor and stared at the wood grain of the door and felt something inside her chest collapse very quietly, like a house settling into its own foundation.

That was the first day.

On the second day, she tried a different approach. No apologies. No confrontation. Just presence. She would simply exist near Zhao Lingxi, the way she used to, and let proximity do what words could not.

She found Zhao Lingxi in the library, studying formation scrolls for the quarterfinals. Lan Yue sat down across from her without asking permission and placed a cup of jasmine tea on the table.

"I thought you might want this," she said.

Zhao Lingxi glanced at the tea. "Thank you."

She went back to reading.

Lan Yue sat there. She did not speak. She did not fidget. She simply occupied the chair and breathed and waited for some crack to appear in the wall between them.

Minutes passed. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Zhao Lingxi turned pages with steady hands. She made notes in margins with precise, unhurried strokes. She cross referenced one scroll against another, frowned faintly at a calculation, corrected it, moved on. She performed every action with the natural ease of someone completely alone.

The tea grew cold. She never touched it.

At some point, Lan Yue realized she was not being ignored. That would have required Zhao Lingxi to notice her and then choose to look away. This was something worse. Zhao Lingxi was not choosing to ignore her. She had simply reorganized her awareness of the room, and Lan Yue was no longer inside it.

She left after forty minutes. Zhao Lingxi did not look up when she stood. Did not look up when the chair scraped back. Did not look up when Lan Yue’s footsteps faded down the corridor. She turned another page and kept reading, and the cold tea sat between them like a small monument to something that used to matter.

On the third morning, the thing Lan Yue feared most happened.

She was crossing the courtyard when she heard laughter. Not loud. Soft, surprised, the kind of laugh that escapes before you can catch it. Tang Xiaoli’s laugh.

Lan Yue looked toward the sound and saw them. Tang Xiaoli and Zhao Lingxi, walking together along the covered pathway near the herb garden. Tang Xiaoli was talking with her hands, gesturing wildly about something, probably an alchemy disaster, and Zhao Lingxi was listening. Really listening, with her head tilted slightly and her pace matched to Tang Xiaoli’s shorter stride.

Then Tang Xiaoli said something, and Zhao Lingxi’s mouth moved. Not a smile. Not quite. But the ghost of one. The faintest softening at the corners of her lips, the kind of expression that most people would miss entirely but that Lan Yue had spent months learning to recognize because it was so rare, so carefully rationed, that seeing it felt like watching a flower bloom in winter.

She was giving it to Tang Xiaoli.

Lan Yue stood in the middle of the courtyard and watched, and something inside her cracked open like an egg. Not anger. Not jealousy. Something lonelier. The realization that Zhao Lingxi was not incapable of warmth. She had not frozen over entirely. She was still soft, still present, still human, just not for Lan Yue. Not anymore.

The warmth had not disappeared. It had simply been redirected, handed to people who had not taken it and broken it against the floor.

Lan Yue turned and walked the other way. She made it to the empty corridor behind the alchemy hall before her back hit the wall and she had to stop and press both hands flat against her stomach because something in there was twisting and she could not make it stop.

That afternoon, she went to Bai Xuelan. Not because she thought Bai Xuelan could fix it, but because Bai Xuelan was the only person she knew who would not try to make her feel better.

"She talks to everyone," Lan Yue said. She sat on the floor surrounded by research scrolls and stared at her hands. "Tang Xiaoli. The training instructors. I saw her nod at Mo Tian yesterday. A nod. She acknowledged Mo Tian’s existence, and he is the man who shows up to breakfast in a palanquin. She will give a nod to the Crown Prince and give me nothing."

Bai Xuelan did not look up from her research. "You told her she was like her family."

"I know."

"The family that had a seventeen year old boy’s meridians destroyed and framed her for it."

"I know what I said."

"Then you understand the response." Bai Xuelan set her brush down and looked at Lan Yue over her glasses. "She is not punishing you. Punishment implies she is thinking about you. She is not thinking about you. She has reclassified you."

"Reclassified."

"You were inside her walls. Now you are outside. The coldness you are experiencing is not aimed at you specifically. It is the default. It is how she treats everyone she does not trust, and you simply never experienced it before because you were never on this side of it."

Lan Yue said nothing.

"You were the exception, Lan Yue. Out of every person in this sect, every disciple, every elder, every scheming relative who smiled while sharpening a knife behind their back, you were the one person she believed would not use her wounds against her." Bai Xuelan paused. "And then you did."

"I did not mean it."

"Intent does not repair damage. A sword does not care why it was swung."

Lan Yue pressed her forehead against her knees. The red thread on her wrist lay flat against her skin. No warmth. No cold. No pulse. It had the weight of dead silk, still present but carrying nothing.

That evening, she saw Zhao Lingxi one last time.

It was near the dining hall. Zhao Lingxi was leaving as Lan Yue was arriving. Their paths crossed at the doorway, and for one unavoidable second, they were face to face.

Lan Yue looked into her eyes and searched for something. Anything. Anger would have been a gift. Sadness would have been a mercy. Even hatred would have meant that what they had still mattered enough to generate heat.

Zhao Lingxi met her gaze. Held it. And there was nothing hostile in her expression. Nothing wounded. She looked at Lan Yue the way she looked at corridor walls and training dummies and the tea she never drank. With the mild, steady recognition of something that existed in her environment but had no bearing on her life.

"Excuse me," Zhao Lingxi said, and stepped around her.

Her shoulder did not brush Lan Yue’s. She calculated the distance precisely. Close enough to be polite. Far enough that not a thread of fabric touched.

She walked away. Her footsteps were even. Her back was straight. She did not slow or hurry or glance behind her, because there was nothing behind her worth glancing at.

Lan Yue stood in the doorway and listened to the sound of those footsteps fading, and understood for the first time what she had actually broken.

Not Zhao Lingxi’s trust. Trust could be rebuilt. Not her feelings. Feelings could heal.

She had broken Zhao Lingxi’s belief that it was safe to let someone in. And that belief, once shattered, did not leave sharp edges or dramatic wounds. It simply vanished, like heat leaving a room, until all that remained was a polite, measured, impenetrable cold.

The red thread hung from her wrist like a question no one was asking anymore.

Somewhere across the sect grounds, behind a closed door, Zhao Lingxi sat alone in their room, the room that used to belong to both of them, and did not think about Lan Yue.

That was the cruelest part. She was not forcing herself to stop caring. She had simply remembered how.