God's Gift

Ye Li stared at Shen Minghua in shock, his eyes changing from disbelief to suspicion, and then to confusion.

"So it doesn't matter even if I'm the one who killed you?"

"Just like you said, Ning Jin saved your life and raised you, just like your biological mother." Shen Minghua said calmly, "And Ye Li would never betray his mother just for a few months of love."

Shen Minghua looked at Ye Li with a frank look in his eyes: "To be honest, it is precisely because I know what your choice is that I have been brooding over this matter since I came out of the trial."

He raised the corners of his mouth and smiled slightly: "So fortunately, we are not on opposite sides this time."

Shen Minghua's words were like a thunderclap, resounding in Ye Li's mind, leaving her stunned for a long time. Was the person Shen Minghua really in love with her? And to this extent?

When did it start?

Ye Li glanced at Shen Minghua in surprise and began to wonder if he had some masochistic fetish or some perverted desire that made him continue to like someone who had killed him.

But before Ye Li could come up with an answer, Shen Minghua stood up and said, "Let's continue on our way. We have wasted too much time here. We need to meet up with Lu Keming and Youyou as soon as possible."

Speaking of business, Ye Li remembered that Shen Minghua had not answered her question just now, "You also know that we wasted a lot of time. You haven't answered my question just now."

"What's the problem?" Shen Minghua asked subconsciously, but soon realized that Ye Li was talking about the rat swarm. He smiled and said, "That's because I thought you were buried underground."

"I thought, if it weren't for those rats, we wouldn't be trapped in the tunnel, the tunnel wouldn't collapse, and you wouldn't be buried. At that moment, I hated those rats so much."

"Me?" Ye Li realized belatedly that when Shen Minghua talked about separation of life and death, he thought she was dead.

Her voice was stuck in her throat, neither rising nor falling. After a long while, she pretended to be calm and answered:

"Then hurry up and get going."

Shen Minghua laughed, his voice somewhat teasing: "Yes, sir."

-

In the desert at dawn, the half-dawn light paints the sky dark blue, and the ruins of the city sleep in the golden desert.

The gull wind chimes hanging in the villa were struck by the cool desert breeze, creating a crisp sound. Against the blue sky, it was like a seagull that had separated from its flock at dawn, flying aimlessly over the boundless ocean, chirping in loneliness.

Xiaoou woke up early, sat on the sofa, and waited for the wind.

She clenched her hands into the shape of seagull wings, wiggled her fingers to the sound of the wind chimes, and closed her eyes to make flying movements. At this moment, she seemed to have become the seagull, flying alone over the ocean at dawn.

"Do you want to be this bird too?"

Yu Youyou had quietly sat down next to Xiaoou at some point, and suddenly spoke, startling Xiaoou. Xiaoou opened her eyes abruptly, looking at Yu Youyou, who had no sense of boundaries and was sitting directly next to her, chewing an apple.

But she obviously didn't know how to express her emotions. She kept staring at Yu Youyou's butt until her face turned red, but Yu Youyou was still chewing the apple.

Xiaoou silently pulled the quilt and said, "This is not an ordinary bird. This is a seagull."

This was the first time Xiaoou mentioned these seagulls since Yu Youyou came to the villa.

"The seagull is a nominative subspecies of the common seagull of the Laridae family, genus Larus, and generally weighs between 394-586 grams, can reach a length of 510 mm, and can live up to 24 years. Seagulls are migratory birds, and during the breeding season they mainly inhabit rivers, lakes, ponds and swamps in open areas such as the Arctic tundra, forest tundra, deserts, and grasslands."

"In winter, they live mainly on the coast, in estuaries and harbors, and during migration they also appear in large inland rivers and lakes..."

Xiaoou usually speaks at a leisurely pace, and is calm even when she is explaining diseases to them. But when she talks about these gulls, her speech speed becomes much faster, and her eyes light up, and it can be seen that she really likes these gulls.

While she was talking, Yu Youyou did not interrupt her, but quietly ate her apple and listened to Xiaoou talk about the origin of the seagull's name, the color of its feathers, and its favorite food.

Few people have the patience to listen to Xiaoou talking so much about seagulls. The more Xiaoou talks, the more excited he becomes, and he keeps talking.

When Xiaoou mentioned food, Yu Youyou added: "I know, they also like to eat French fries, bread, biscuits..."

"Huh?" Xiaoou was a little confused. These contents were not written in the bird encyclopedia.

"Don't you know?" Yu Youyou stuffed an apple in her mouth and looked at Xiaoou strangely: "Seagulls are well-known robbers and thieves on the coast. They like to stay on the shore and wait for humans to come and snatch their food."

Yu Youyou looked at Xiaoou's eyes full of curiosity, sat up straight, coughed twice, and started Yu Youyou's lecture seriously.

"It's much faster to snatch food from humans than to go fishing in the sea. Humans are easy to deceive and snatch, so more and more seagulls like to go to the coast where humans live to find food."

"Breaded chips taste much better to them than ocean fish."

Of course, Yu Youyou also thinks so.

She licked the corner of her mouth, recalling the taste of human bread and chips, and understood why the seagulls liked to snatch bread and chips.

If she could fly, she would go and grab it too.

Xiaoou saw Yu Youyou suddenly drooling and asked anxiously, "Then what?"

Yu Youyou came to her senses: "But as time went on, the number of human victims snatched by seagulls increased, so they began to hate seagulls and called them flying mice."

"Because not only do they steal food, they also beat people up and poop everywhere!"

Yu Youyou got angry when she thought about the time when she was watching the sunset on the sea and a passing seagull defecated on her head.

Xiaoou carefully wrote down what Yuyouyou said, and then asked, "How do you know so much? What book did you read it from?"

Xiao Ou was a little confused. She owned almost all the popular science books about gulls on the market, and her photographic memory allowed her to quickly memorize all the contents of those books.

So Xiaoou was very sure that she had not seen these contents in those books.

Yu Youyou answered without hesitation: "I heard it from Xiaoyu."

Those humans whose food had been snatched away or who had been beaten by seagulls cursed loudly on the shore. The small fish on the shore heard this and gossiped with other fish in the sea. Soon the seagulls' bad reputation spread throughout the ocean, and all the fish knew what bad things the seagulls had done.

Of course, its reputation among fish was not very good.

Little Ou repeated uncertainly: "Did you hear from Little Fish?"

Lu Keming brought out a plate of toast from the kitchen and happened to overhear the conversation between the two.

He put the bread on the table, looked back at Xiaoou, and calmly changed the subject:

"It sounds like this is a very uncultured bird?"

"Only humans need quality." Strangely, after hearing a bunch of bad things said by the seagull, Xiaoou's filter did not break, but continued to speak for the seagull:

“Animals don’t need qualities.”