Qingran didn't reply. Her gaze remained on the board, as if Yu Song's words were too heavy to respond to directly. The air in the room grew still.
Meng Nian looked down at his hands, his fingers curled loosely around the edge of the table. "It's strange," he murmured, "I thought knowing the truth would make you seem less human. But now that I do… you seem more real than anyone else I've met since the world ended."
Qingran gave a dry chuckle. "Don't start romanticizing it. I'm not doing this to be noble. I'm doing it because I want to live."
"You could've abandoned all of us," Meng Nian said. "You had every reason to. But you didn't."
"I had every reason to," she agreed. "But I also had one reason not to."
"And what's that?"
She looked at him then, her expression still unreadable but her voice softer than before. "Because living alone isn't living at all. I learned that the hard way."
