[GL] I'm Just A Side Character... So Why Is The Heroine Chasing Me?!-Chapter 68: What lives beneath

Zhao Lingxi’s hands were shaking.

Lan Yue found her in the preparation room behind the arena. The door was ajar. Inside, Zhao Lingxi stood with her back to the entrance, both palms pressed flat against the stone wall, her forehead resting against the cool surface between them. Her breathing was controlled. Too controlled. The deliberate rhythm of someone manually overriding their body’s desire to fall apart.

Lan Yue stepped inside and closed the door.

"Everyone is gone," she said. "The healers cleared out. Mo Tian is keeping the corridor empty."

Zhao Lingxi did not turn around. "You saw it."

"I saw it."

"The dark ice. The thing that dissolved the dome." Her voice was steady, but her fingers pressed harder against the wall. The stone beneath her palms began to frost. "I did not call it. It came on its own. When Chen Yulong’s cyclone broke through my third layer, something inside me decided that my techniques were not enough and offered an alternative."

"Offered?"

"That is what it feels like. Not a force. Not an intrusion. An offer. Like a hand extending from somewhere deep, holding exactly what I need, waiting for me to take it." She paused. "I took it."

Lan Yue moved closer. The air in the room was cold, colder than it should have been, and the frost on the wall beneath Zhao Lingxi’s hands was spreading in patterns that did not look like ice. They looked like roots.

"Last night," Lan Yue said carefully, "you said there was something you needed to tell me."

Zhao Lingxi finally turned around. Her face was composed. Her eyes were clear, pale blue, no trace of darkness or red. But she looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the fight. The exhaustion of someone who had been carrying a secret so heavy it had reshaped the way she stood.

"Sit down," she said.

Lan Yue sat on the wooden bench against the wall. Zhao Lingxi remained standing. She seemed to need the height, the distance, the ability to pace if the words required movement.

"When I was banished," she began, "I spent the first three years in the outer territories. You know this. The Zhao family sent me to a minor sect outpost near the border, where the spiritual energy was thin and cultivation progress was nearly impossible. It was meant to stunt my growth permanently."

Lan Yue nodded. She knew the broad strokes. The details had always been vague.

"In the fourth year, the outpost was attacked. Border creatures. Not high level, but enough to overwhelm the defenses. Most of the outpost cultivators fled. I could not. My cultivation was too damaged. I hid in the underground storage chambers beneath the outpost and waited for the attack to end."

She stopped pacing. Her hands, which had been clasped behind her back, came forward and settled at her sides.

"The storage chambers were old. Older than the outpost. Older than the sect that built it. They were carved from stone that predated any formation work I had ever seen. And at the bottom, beneath three collapsed floors and a seal that had been eroding for centuries, there was a room."

The temperature in the preparation room dropped again. Lan Yue felt the cold settle against her skin like a second layer of clothing.

"The room contained a body."

Lan Yue went still.

"Not a corpse. A body. Preserved. Seated in a meditation posture on a stone platform, surrounded by formation lines that had long since stopped functioning. She was a woman. Young, maybe my age, maybe younger. Her robes were black, and the spiritual energy around her was unlike anything I had ever felt. Cold. Deep. Patient. Like standing at the edge of a well that had no bottom."

Zhao Lingxi looked at Lan Yue directly.

"She opened her eyes when I entered the room."

The silence that followed was absolute. Lan Yue could hear her own heartbeat, the frost creeping along the wall, the faint hum of the arena barriers outside.

"She did not speak. Not with words. But I understood her the way you understand a dream while you are inside it. She was old. Impossibly old. She had been sealed there by people who feared what she was, and the seal had held for so long that she had become part of the stone. Part of the earth. Part of the spiritual fabric of the land itself."

"What was she?" Lan Yue asked. Her voice was barely above a whisper.

"The texts would call her a demonic cultivator. Bai Xuelan’s research would classify her as a parasitic spiritual entity. The elders of any major sect would order her destroyed on sight." Zhao Lingxi paused. "She called herself a gardener."

"A gardener."

"She said she grew things. Abilities. Potential. Roots." Zhao Lingxi looked down at her own hands. "My spirit roots were shattered. Three of them, broken beyond any healer’s ability to repair. She looked at them the way a farmer looks at damaged soil. Not with pity. With professional interest."

"She offered to fix them."

"She offered to plant new ones."

The words hung in the air between them.

"She said the process would take years. She would merge a fragment of herself into my root system, a seed, she called it. It would grow alongside my original roots, supporting them, strengthening them, eventually restoring what had been broken. But the seed would carry her nature. Her energy. Her... perspective."

"The golden light," Lan Yue said.

"That is the seed growing. The root reformation that Bai Xuelan has been studying. It is not my original spiritual energy regenerating. It is something new being built on top of the ruins."

"And the dark ice? The thing from today?"

Zhao Lingxi was quiet for a long time.

"That is her."

Three words. Delivered simply. Without drama. Without the weight they deserved.

"The seed is maturing. As it grows, it produces techniques that are not mine. They come from her knowledge, her cultivation, her understanding of energy that operates outside the frameworks the sects recognize. I can use them. They respond to me. But they are not mine."

"Can you control them?"

"Most of the time. Today, in the cyclone, my control slipped. The seed responded to the threat faster than I could, and it used a technique I had never seen before." She flexed her fingers. "It worked. It saved me. And it terrified me."

Lan Yue stood. She crossed the space between them and stopped in front of Zhao Lingxi. Close. The way she had learned to stand with this woman, near enough to matter, careful enough not to crowd.

"Is it dangerous?" she asked. "The seed. The gardener. Whatever is growing inside you. Is it going to hurt you?"

"She said it would not."

"Do you believe her?"

Zhao Lingxi met her eyes. "I believe she meant it when she said it. But she has been sealed underground for centuries, and her understanding of the human body is not the same as a living person’s. She thinks in roots and soil and seasons. She does not think in meridians and spirit cores and the kinds of measurements that tell you whether something is killing you slowly."

"Bai Xuelan could examine you. She has been researching this for weeks. If anyone can determine whether the seed is safe..."

"I know. That is why I am telling you now." Zhao Lingxi’s voice softened. "I have been managing this alone because I thought that was the only option. Because the moment anyone discovered what was inside me, the classification would be demonic and the response would be destruction."

"We would never let that happen."

"I know that now. I did not know it three weeks ago." She paused. "Three weeks ago, I thought the only person I had was myself. Then you held an umbrella out in the rain and got soaked, and I remembered that I was wrong."

Lan Yue’s throat tightened. "You are going to make me cry in a preparation room."

"You have cried in worse locations."

"That is not the comfort you think it is."

The corner of Zhao Lingxi’s mouth curved. Real. Warm. The expression that Lan Yue had spent months learning to recognize because it was the rarest thing in the world.

"After the tournament," Zhao Lingxi said. "After the inquiry. After all of this is settled. I want Bai Xuelan to examine me properly. The seed, the root reformation, all of it. No more secrets."

"No more secrets," Lan Yue agreed.

Zhao Lingxi reached out and took Lan Yue’s hand. Not gently this time. Firmly. Her fingers were cold from the frost, but the grip was warm in the way that mattered, certain, deliberate, the grip of someone holding something they had decided not to let go of.

The red thread between their wrists blazed. Not just warm. Bright. Visible to both of them for the first time, a thin line of crimson light connecting one pulse to the other, steady as a heartbeat.

They stood together in the cold room with frost on the walls and the distant roar of the crowd outside, and for one quiet moment, the secret that had been eating Zhao Lingxi alive from the inside was no longer hers alone.

It was theirs. All of it. The seed. The danger. The unknown.

And somehow, shared, it weighed less.