"Is this your first ti visiting Qiong City?" the driver asked, glancing in the rearview mirror.
"Yes."
"No."
Hearing the driver’s question, Lin Li and Su Yue gave different answers.
"Huh?!!" Lin Li turned to Su Yue. "I didn’t realize you’d been to Qiong City before. If you’ve already been here, why co again?"
"The last ti I ca to Qiong City with my parents was five years ago. I was still in college back then...
So much ti has passed. Isn’t it perfectly normal to visit again?" Su Yue said matter-of-factly, giving Lin Li a bewildered look.
"Er..." Lin Li was speechless. After a mont’s thought, he said, "Alright! You have a point..."
The driver was a kind man. Mistaking Lin Li and Su Yue for a couple, he smiled and tried to smooth things over.
"You two, the hotel you’re heading to in Crescent Bay is near a pier. Every evening, the fishern who’ve been out at sea return and set up stalls on the pier. You can get a lot of cheap seafood then.
If you want to eat seafood, you can go to the pier around that ti, buy so directly from the fishern, and then pay a small fee to have a chef at a nearby restaurant cook it for you. You’ll save a ton of money that way."
"Okay, thank you, sir," Su Yue said with a smile, thanking the kind driver.
Beside her, Lin Li’s phone made a DING sound. He pulled it from his pocket to see a ssage from Liu Jialin.
"Lin Li, I turned in the Spirit Burst Pill you gave . Thanks to you again, my supervisor gave another comndation.
Are you free tonight? I want to treat you to dinner. We won’t go to yesterday’s restaurant; I’ll take you to a different one."
Lin Li quickly scanned Liu Jialin’s ssage and typed a reply, "I’m out of town on a trip with a friend. I’m not in Rongcheng right now."
"DING."
Just a few seconds after Lin Li sent his ssage, a reply ca back.
"Oh, you’re on a trip! Alright then, I’ll treat you to dinner after you get back."
"Okay."
Lin Li sent a simple reply. Just then, Su Yue, sitting beside him, noticed him ssaging soone and her gaze imdiately shifted over.
Before Su Yue’s eyes could land on his phone screen, Lin Li quickly locked it and stuffed it back into his pocket.
Seeing Lin Li put his phone away in a bit of a hurry, Su Yue eyed him suspiciously from head to toe. But she didn’t ask anything, simply turning her gaze away again toward the boundless, azure sea in the distance.
When Lin Li saw Su Yue look away without asking anything, he breathed a sigh of relief. Then he couldn’t help but mutter to himself internally.
’Ugh... Why am I so nervous? So what if Su Yue asks? I could just tell her a friend invited to dinner, and that would be that.’
A short while after this little episode, the driver brought Lin Li and Su Yue to their hotel in Crescent Bay.
The hotel they were staying at this ti was very close to the sea. The beach was just a two or three-hundred-ter walk from the main entrance.
"Welco," the hotel receptionist greeted the two guests before her with a smile.
"Hello, I booked two rooms online," Su Yue said to the receptionist. She then took her phone out of her bag, opened the app, and showed the relevant booking number.
"Please wait a mont, you two." The receptionist did so work on the computer in front of her, then asked Lin Li and Su Yue to present their IDs for registration.
Once that was done, she called over a colleague to take Lin Li and Su Yue to their reserved rooms.
The hotel had nine floors in total. The rooms Lin Li and Su Yue had booked online were on the sixth floor, at the very end of the hall, right next to each other.
"Sir, ma’am, please hold on to your key cards. If you happen to lose them, you can get replacents at the front desk with your ID.
If you need anything else, you can call the front desk anyti using the landline in your room, and we will arrange it for you imdiately."
After explaining a few things, the attendant who had brought Lin Li and Su Yue to their rooms departed.
"I’m so tired! I’m going to get so rest. See you this evening..." After the hotel attendant left, Lin Li opened his room with his key card and said to Su Yue.
Then, he pulled his suitcase into his room and closed the door behind him.
’Five hundred yuan a day for a room sure isn’t cheap!’
But once Lin Li was inside his room, he saw it was a suite with a bedroom, a living room, a bathroom, and even a balcony. Standing on the balcony, he could gaze out at the boundless sea in the distance.
He suddenly felt that the five-hundred-yuan-a-day room was well worth it.
Outside the door.
"..." Su Yue stared speechlessly at the door Lin Li had just closed.
She had thought about it on the plane; she couldn’t let Lin Li waste the entire afternoon cooped up in his room.
So... Su Yue used her key card to open her own door, dropped her suitcase inside, then walked over to Lin Li’s room and knocked.
"KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK..."
The sound of knocking rang out.
Lin Li, who had been gazing into the distance from his balcony, heard the knock on his door and turned to leave the balcony.
"CLICK."
After he opened the door, a radiant figure appeared before him.
"What’s up?"
"Co on, let’s go for a walk on the beach."
"..." Lin Li shook his head. "It’s so hot outside. Let’s go out later.
Besides, the journey was exhausting. I’m pretty tired and want to take a nap and rest for a bit."
"The whole way here was either by plane or taxi. We barely walked at all. What’s there to be tired about?" Su Yue pouted, knowing he was just saying that because he didn’t want to go out.
"You’re right. We either took a plane or a taxi the whole way, and we barely walked. Physically tired? Definitely not...
But the tired I’m talking about is on a ntal level," Lin Li said, his mind racing to co up with an excuse.
"What are you even talking about? ’ntal level’ tired? You seem plenty energetic to !" Su Yue didn’t buy his excuse, crossing her arms and rolling her eyes at him.
"Lady, we just survived an encounter with a flock of black swans on the plane. It was an emotional rollercoaster. Even the most unflappable person would be a little ntally drained after that.
Don’t be fooled by how energetic I look. I actually have a bit of a headache!" Lin Li said with a dead-serious expression, as if it were really true, all to avoid going out with Su Yue under the scorching sun.
"..." When Su Yue heard Lin Li bring up the black swan incident on the plane, she started to believe his claim of being ntally drained.
Although Su Yue had also been frightened by the black swan incident on the plane, she hadn’t felt any discomfort afterward, let alone anything like ntal exhaustion.
But Lin Li had said it, and he’d connected it to the black swan incident.
Logically speaking, for soone flying for the first ti to encounter sothing like that, it would be perfectly normal for an ordinary person to be frightened to the point of ntal exhaustion.
"Alright then! Since you have a headache, you get so rest. I’ll go walk around the hotel area by myself first, and I’ll co get you later."
"Okay."
Seeing that he had convinced Su Yue, Lin Li gave himself a ntal thumbs-up for his quick thinking. He then closed the door, looked around his room once more, and went back to playing on his phone.
After Lin Li closed his door, Su Yue left the hotel by herself.
Her objective was clear: after leaving the hotel, she headed straight for the lively beach in the distance.
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