Lili sat in one of Hong Kong's parks, alone. Lucy went to buy coffee. She stared at the natural beauty with a sketchbook open. But the page was blank.
She was looking at the amazing view, but she saw only Jin Lei's smile in her mind. And she was unable to forget it. It was such a charming smile. Beautiful. Her hand moved, and she started to draw.
After a while of using a pencil, she looked at the page properly. She wasn't drawing any jewelry, but she drew his smile. By her memory. Oh, god, she was so damned. But the drawing was pretty nice.
She placed the sketchbook on a side, tilted her head back, and closed her eyes. She was doomed. Lili knew those symptoms. For her, it meant that she became interested in the guy. And Lili hated that feeling.
Once, she was rejected harshly. Well, she shouldn't say rejected. Because she wasn't rejected. She liked the guy, he liked her. But because she wanted to go away to another town to study, he said some harsh words to her, leaving a minor wound in her heart.
Later, when she tried to like another guy, he said the exact same words to her, leaving her feeling sad, depressed, and utterly defeated.
'You will never be good enough. For anybody. Everyone is better off without you.' The same words said by two guys. A total defeat. Lili felt worthless, with no self-esteem. So, no more liking a guy.
She wouldn't be good enough for a company boss for sure, let alone an Asian CEO. Lili recalled all the dramas she had seen and bitterly laughed.
"It was really a brutal smile. We never saw him smile like that before," someone said and pointed at the smile she drew.
Lili jerked her head up and looked at the person speaking to her. She got scared because she didn't recognize this boy. But he looked young, like 18 or 19 years old. She flashed a confused smile at him and said nothing.
"Hello, I'm Wang Yitian. Member of the Vermilion Dragon." He held out his hand and introduced himself, leaving her speechless. How did he...? Then she remembered. He was one of the guys that saw her faux pas, and she blushed.
"H-hello, I'm Lili Park," she said, her voice shaky and not sure what she was supposed to do.
"I know. I remember." He smiled back, trying to reassure her again. Wang Yitian took the sketchbook and handed it to her while sitting down.
He had already seen that drawing and there was nothing else in it, so she wasn't in a hurry to take it back.
"It leaves an impression, right? I've known him for four years, but I never saw him smile, certainly not like this." She nodded and took her sketchbook with the drawing she's done back. He looked lost in thoughts for a while.
"Do you like games?" he said out of nowhere. Lili laughed and nodded. Suddenly, the guy beside her smiled brightly and sprung out.
"Do you have time right now?" he asked joyfully. She nodded again, a bit scared. He was a stranger to her.
"Do you want to go with me and see our playroom?" he asked, and she suddenly remembered a book that was popular a while ago, and imagined a different room than he was probably suggesting.
But she really loved games, and she was already there, once. So, why not go again? She could take their measurements while being at it.
"I mean, if you want to come with me to play the SoL in our team room?" He laughed, and she felt relieved that she assessed his character right.
"Yes," she said, and he smiled at her when she was packing her things.
When they had talked in a taxi, she got suspicious about the identity of this boy. She knew his voice from a game. But she was not sure. How fickle would fate be to lead her their way? But he never said anything about her profile in the game.
Then they arrived at the gate of their headquarters. And she put together things that she didn't notice before. For example, their guild's name is Dragon's Den.
Lili smiled a little. She knew why Lei's and Yitian's voices were so familiar. She had listened to them every day for the past week.
But she would say nothing for now. It's not that hard to connect Lili to Blacklily. Because which girl with a lily in her name would be a healer, knew how to play games and travel to Hong Kong at the same time as her?
Wang Yitian took her to a different house by the side entrance, and heck, that scared her. But when the doors opened to an open room without a ceiling and only glass instead of the roof, Lili calmed down.
The tables were full of the best gaming equipment, plexiglass instead of sides of the computers so that you could see it working, lit up with red color. She was looking around speechless when a handsome boy spoke to her guide.
"She is the one…" he started in English, but that boy stopped him and pissed her off in English, too.
"Girl? Playing? Impossible," Yixing laughed and Yitian facepalmed himself.
"Oh, boy. You will be surprised how good of a smith I'm. Just lend me an account with a weaponsmith job, some fit materials, and I'll make you a weapon you would want to keep," she said mockingly. She thought respect towards elders could keep away some comments. But no, being a woman was obviously bad in the gaming world.
What she hated the most was when someone made fun of her playing games just because she was a girl. Lili couldn't wait for the faces they were going to make when she would reveal any weapon or her account.
After some bickering, one guy came and logged into his account on the computer she sat at. She quickly looked into his weaponsmithing abilities. He wasn't bad. Not as skilled as her, but sufficient.
Lili selected the materials she saw he had in the inventory and went to buy one last piece from the shopkeeper she knew. Lili had the recipe in her mind.
And she knew who they were and which weapon they probably needed. But still, she looked behind her and got a bit startled because she was surrounded by all of them.
"The knives. Right?" The owner of the account nodded with a surprised face. Lili did not know what was so surprising about that.
When she looked into his profile, she noticed his weapons were low premium-level knives, not even legendary-level. Of course, he needed better, otherwise, he would drag the team down.
She started to forge the low-level materials by hand, gaining lots of exp. It was just pressing the keyboard arrows when they overlap with the corresponding ones on the screen. Lili used to play DDR on a keyboard. Who knew it would make her perfect for a weaponsmithing in the game later?
By the time she started to forge the rarer materials, arrows got very quick. When she made them into the ingots and the jewels, she needed the correct combination sequences.
Lili did this recipe many times, so she did not need the recipe scroll for this. But the last step. Was the worst. The hardest. And depended on pure luck.
It took her around ten minutes to get to the last stage, then she pressed the combine button and hoped for the best.
Congratulation dialog popped up, and she was happy. Yey, the legendary weapon called The Knives of Dawn, the price being five million gold. Behind her was silence.
"You want to know who I am?" After nobody said anything, she logged out of this account and logged in as Blacklily. The silence was impenetrable.
"You let a stranger into our training room!" One sentence, in English, startled everyone. Even Lili. She stood up and looked at Jin Lei, aka Thunder.