Dong Huiying found herself actually missing this very taste.
It was Yixuan’s scent.
After the meal, she told her brothers that she wanted to go to town. Liang Haoming approached her expressionlessly, silently indicating that he wanted to follow. Liang Yuening also wanted to join, but was held back by his elder brother, "Yuening, come with me to the mountains later."
"Ah?" Liang Yuening glanced at his elder brother, then at Dong Huiying, his shoulders slumping like a little one pitifully let down.
In Liang’s backyard, there was a paddock, containing two horses. One was the horse from yesterday’s carriage, the other was purchased by Dong Huiying in Jun City during a gold-harvesting trip to buy medicinal herbs.
Haoming walked into the paddock, touched the neck of one horse, and then turned to look at Dong Huiying.
The young girl’s face stiffened, "I... I’ll just ride Da Bai." She remembered getting sick from riding horses, vomiting every time she mounted one.
Haoming said flatly, "No."
The corners of the young girl’s mouth twitched, "Then, shall we just walk there?"
Haoming glanced at her.
He said nothing yet somehow she felt utterly defeated.
In the end, she approached the other horse with her head down, dragging her feet. Haoming, however, looked at her suspiciously. "Can you ride?"
It seemed, perhaps, she might not know how to ride?
With a forceful push off the ground, Haoming swung himself onto the horse with a smooth and suave motion.
Afterward, he extended a hand.
"This..." She was still hesitating when he, having taken the reins in hand, rode up to her, reached out with a long arm, wrapped it around her waist, and then she let out a gasp.
By the time she came to her senses, she was sitting sideways on the horse, leaning against Haoming’s chest, her heartbeat erratic and her small hands clutching Haoming’s shirt.
Haoming lowered his gaze at her, and suddenly the corners of his lips curved slightly.
Dong Huiying wore an expression as if she’d seen a ghost.
"Liang Haoming, were you just laughing at me?"
He immediately reverted to his impassive, ice-cold demeanor, "No!"
She squinted, "Really?"
Serious face: "Really no!"
Her eyes twitched severely.
Why didn’t she believe him at all?
Haoming’s ears turned a bit red, seemingly uncomfortable, then he grasped her hands and placed them around his waist from the front, "Hold on tight."
Then, with a squeeze of his long legs against the horse’s flanks, the horse neighed loudly and started trotting off with a bumpy gait.
Dong Huiying was very nervous inside. She thought she would definitely get dizzy from riding, like in the past, but strangely enough, even though she was nervous, by the time the black horse burst out of the village and headed down the mountain, she didn’t feel a bit of a reaction.
She furrowed her little eyebrows.
Why wasn’t she feeling sick at all this time? Could it be she was no longer affected by the motion of the horse?
It was clear that previously, as soon as she mounted a horse, she would vomit so hard that the world would spin.
Then she suddenly remembered the Devouring God Gu and carefully compared her experiences: it seemed that before she extracted the Gu, she would get dizzy on horses, but after the extraction, this adverse reaction was gone.
Could it be that her past dizziness was also due to the Devouring God Gu?
The black horse ran wildly, at a breakneck pace, and she bounced a little, her small body sliding downwards. Startled, she was about to react, but was suddenly caught by someone gripping her waist.
Haoming held her waist and earnestly admonished her, "Don’t move around!"
Traveling by horseback was much faster than descending the mountain on foot.
Dong Huiying remembered that it used to take nearly half a day just to get to town by foot, and since the mountain roads were not easy to navigate at night, she typically had to delay for a night in Taihang Town, only able to return the following day.