[GL] I'm Just A Side Character... So Why Is The Heroine Chasing Me?!-Chapter 74: Interview

Inspector Luo Zhiyan conducted interviews the way a surgeon conducted operations. Precise. Unhurried. Without anesthesia.

Zhao Lingxi entered the formal meeting hall at the appointed hour wearing clean white robes and an expression of composed neutrality. Lan Yue walked beside her to the door, where two imperial guards stood with politely immovable faces.

"Only the subject," the left guard said.

"I am her attendant," Lan Yue tried.

"Only the subject."

Zhao Lingxi placed a hand on Lan Yue’s arm. Brief. Warm. The touch carried more reassurance than a thousand words could have managed.

"Wait here," she said. Not a request. The voice. The low, even voice that settled into Lan Yue’s bones and made her body obey while her brain was still formulating objections.

"I will be right outside," Lan Yue said.

"I know."

Zhao Lingxi walked through the doors. They closed behind her.

Lan Yue stood in the corridor and proceeded to have the worst three hours of her life.

She paced. She sat. She paced again. She leaned against the wall, slid to the floor, stood back up, and paced some more. Tang Xiaoli brought her tea, which she held without drinking until it went cold. Bai Xuelan brought her a scroll on meditation techniques for anxiety management, which she used as something to roll and unroll in her hands while pacing.

Mo Tian sat across the corridor on a bench, his fan moving in slow, rhythmic arcs.

"She will be fine," he said for the fourth time.

"I know she will be fine."

"You are wearing a groove in the stone."

"The stone can handle it."

"Lan Yue."

"What?"

"Sit down. You are making the guards nervous."

She sat. She lasted approximately ninety seconds before standing again.

Inside the meeting hall, the interview proceeded in stages.

Lan Yue would not learn the details until later, when Zhao Lingxi recounted them that evening in their room, her voice steady, her hands wrapped around a cup of tea that she drank slowly between sentences. But the shape of it was this.

Inspector Luo began with the tournament. Factual. Sequential. What happened in the match against Wen Hao. What happened in the quarterfinal against Shen Zhiran. What Zhao Lingxi observed, what she knew, and what she suspected. She answered everything directly, without embellishment, without deflection.

Then Inspector Luo shifted to the Zhao family. This portion lasted an hour. She asked about Elder Zhao Chenguang’s role in Zhao Lingxi’s banishment. She asked about the hairpin with the tracking formation. She asked about Zhao Ruoqing’s relationship with Qin Wen, the timing of their meetings, the nature of their communications. Zhao Lingxi provided everything she knew, flagging clearly where knowledge ended and inference began.

Inspector Luo asked about the engagement to Shen Yiming. About the contract clause granting the witnessing clan petition rights. About the Qin family’s declining bloodline and the strategic value of Zhao Lingxi’s spiritual roots.

Zhao Lingxi answered all of it. Calmly. Completely. Without visible emotion.

Then Inspector Luo set down her brush, folded her hands, and said, "Now. Tell me about the energy."

This was the moment Bai Xuelan had prepared for. Zhao Lingxi presented the medical assessment first. Baseline readings. Spiritual output charts. The symbiotic ratio between her original root energy and the seed’s contribution, documented in Bai Xuelan’s meticulous hand, showing a stable, mutually beneficial relationship.

She told Inspector Luo about the banishment. The border outpost. The attack. The underground chamber. The woman on the stone platform who called herself a gardener.

She told her about the shattered roots and the offer to plant new ones. About the years of slow growth, the careful hiding, the midnight training sessions in dead circles of ash.

She told her everything.

Inspector Luo listened without interrupting. When Zhao Lingxi finished, the inspector was quiet for a long time.

"The current sect classification for your condition would be demonic cultivation," Inspector Luo said. Not as an accusation. As a fact, laid on the table for both of them to look at.

"I am aware," Zhao Lingxi said.

"The classification carries mandatory consequences regardless of circumstance. The law does not distinguish between voluntary demonic practice and involuntary spiritual symbiosis."

"I am aware of that as well."

Inspector Luo studied her. "You came to this interview knowing that full disclosure could result in your destruction, and you disclosed fully anyway. Why?"

"Because a man who has spent two years destroying innocent people is attempting to use my condition as a weapon to avoid accountability. If I hide what I am, his accusation controls the narrative. If I reveal it on my own terms, the accusation becomes part of his pattern rather than a separate truth."

"You are gambling that transparency protects you better than secrecy."

"I am gambling that the person investigating this case is more interested in justice than in classification."

Another long silence. Inspector Luo picked up her brush, made a single notation on the scroll in front of her, and said, "I will need to examine you directly. The medical assessment from your colleague is thorough, but the imperial inquiry requires independent verification."

"I consent."

The examination took forty minutes. Inspector Luo was, it turned out, not merely an investigator. She was a former medical elder from the Central Imperial Academy who had been reassigned to judicial work after a political disagreement with the academy council. Her spiritual diagnostic abilities were among the most refined in the empire.

She examined Zhao Lingxi’s meridian system, her root structure, and the seed’s integration with a precision that made Bai Xuelan’s work look like a rough sketch. When she finished, she sat back and regarded Zhao Lingxi with an expression that was neither judgment nor sympathy. It was curiosity.

"The entity in your root system is not demonic," she said.

Zhao Lingxi went still.

"It is old. Older than the demonic classification system itself. The energy signature predates the current framework by approximately two thousand years." Inspector Luo made another notation. "The sect laws define demonic cultivation based on energy signatures catalogued during the Crimson Purge six centuries ago. Your entity’s signature does not match those records because it existed long before the records were created." 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

"What does that mean for the classification?"

"It means the classification does not apply. Your condition falls outside the scope of the current demonic cultivation statutes." Inspector Luo set down her brush. "It also means I will need to report this to the imperial medical council for separate evaluation, which will take considerably longer than this inquiry and will involve significantly less risk to your physical safety."

Zhao Lingxi said nothing for a moment. Then, very quietly, "Thank you."

"Do not thank me. Thank whoever wrote the demonic cultivation statutes with such rigid specificity that anything outside their experience falls through the legal cracks." Inspector Luo stood. "I have what I need. You are free to go. Please tell the young woman who has been pacing outside for three hours that the floor will survive."

The doors opened. Zhao Lingxi walked out.

Lan Yue was mid pace, her hair slightly disheveled from running her hands through it repeatedly, her face carrying the particular intensity of someone who had been constructing worst case scenarios for one hundred and eighty consecutive minutes.

She stopped. She looked at Zhao Lingxi’s face. She searched it the way she always did, reading the spaces between expressions, the tiny shifts that told her what the composure would not.

Zhao Lingxi’s eyes were bright. Not with tears. With something lighter. Something that Lan Yue had never seen there before.

Relief.

"Well?" Lan Yue said.

"The seed is not classified as demonic. The energy predates the legal framework. It falls outside the statutes."

Lan Yue stared. Her brain processed the words. Reprocessed them. Ran them through a third time to make sure they were real.

"It is not demonic," she repeated.

"It is not demonic."

"You are safe."

"I am safe."

Lan Yue’s knees gave out. Not dramatically. She simply sat down on the corridor floor as if someone had removed the structural supports from her legs. She put her face in her hands and breathed, and the breath came out shaking.

Zhao Lingxi looked down at her. The composure was intact, the posture perfect, the expression serene. But she extended her hand downward, palm open, and waited.

Lan Yue took it.

Zhao Lingxi pulled her to her feet with a grip that was firm and certain. She did not release Lan Yue’s hand immediately. She held it, fingers interlaced, and looked at her with those pale blue eyes that carried every wall she had ever built and every wall she had chosen to take down.

"Stop sitting on floors," Zhao Lingxi said.

"Stop making me think you are about to be executed."

"I will try."

They walked down the corridor together. Hand in hand. Past the imperial guards who pretended not to notice. Past the disciples who absolutely noticed. Past Sun Meihua, who appeared around a corner, saw them, raised an eyebrow, smiled knowingly, and disappeared again without a word.

The red thread between their wrists glowed. Warm. Steady. Bright enough that if anyone had looked closely, they might have seen it.

Nobody looked closely. They did not need to. The way Zhao Lingxi walked, tall and unhurried, her fingers laced through Lan Yue’s with the quiet authority of someone claiming something she had decided was hers, said everything the thread could not.

And Lan Yue, walking beside her with a red face and a racing heart and the overwhelming realization that her hand was being held in public by a woman who could freeze a lake with a thought, decided that being claimed was not the worst thing in the world.

It was not the worst thing at all.