Chapter 376: 376. In The End, Frustrated Feelings Won Over Anything!**

She thought about the component element working on the road that morning. The frequency that resonated like old growth.

The way he had explained it to her in the forest, not performing humility and not performing confidence either, just telling her what it was because she had asked and the question deserved an honest answer.

She thought about the firewood. The way he had said “you do both” when she told him she watched instead of learning and the precision of it, the way it had landed like something that was simply accurate rather than designed to make her feel good.

She thought about his voice at the gorge edge. ’I have you. Don’t let go.’

Four words, and it’s completely steady.

Her heart starts beating, and she can feel her body start to get weird where the dream that’s haunting her mind slowly starts changing because she’s trying to change it into something that’s worth keeping.

’N-No… why did I start to make that dream become a positive dream where Rex is being all gentle to me…?’

’But still… the gorge incident… it proves that he can be gentle with me.’

The leaves in her hair had gone fully gold, the color they turned when the channel was processing something it found significant and had not yet finished categorizing. She was aware of it and made no effort to pull them back.

She remembers that Apollo had confessed at the waterfall, and she had felt it. That was true.

He was someone she had known for long enough to understand the weight of what he was offering, and she was not indifferent to it. She was not the kind of person who received something genuine and felt nothing.

But…

She found the word ’but’ and sat with it for a moment.

When she had been hanging from the limestone crack with the ground gone beneath her and the dust falling from her grip and the gorge below doing what gorges did, she had not thought about Apollo.

She had looked up, and the person she had been hoping to see had not been Apollo.

And that was a turning point…

It was inconvenient information. It was the kind that arrived without being invited and then refused to leave, and it had been sitting in her chest since the bridge with the patient, immovable quality of a root system that had found a crack in the stone and simply grown into it.

Rex’s heroic act for the second time gradually replaced her love for Apollo until she discovered the truth that…

She liked Rex.

But it’s not in the straightforward way she might have liked someone before today, not the simple warmth of two people finding each other intriguing.

It was more layered than that and less comfortable than that, shaped by everything she still did not know about him and everything she had seen today and the gap between the dream and the gorge that she could not close no matter how she thought about it.

It was the kind of feeling that lived in complicated terrain, and she knew it.

But it was there…

’Urghh…’ Nerith felt something was changing in her body when she kept thinking about Rex now.

She starts twitching her thighs together to avoid remembering the feeling Rex once gave her; it had hurt back then, but now she feels a longing for something that is missing.

She opened her eyes and gazed at the steam rising from the water, contemplating the resigned clarity of someone who had finally acknowledged what they had been trying to deny. This expedition still had one more day before reaching the canyon, and Rex Rexilion would be present for all of it.

The amber leaves drifted in the warmth of the water and said nothing helpful.

“Nerith?” Aisella’s voice came from the far end of the women’s section, quiet and careful. “You’re very still over there, something’s in your mind?”

“N-No… it’s fine… I’m just thinking about something,” Nerith said.

“Good thoughts or bad ones?”

“Well… it’s more like a…” She considered this. “…complicated ones.”

Aisella gets close to her. “Do you need company before me and Iris go back to the inn?”

“No,” Nerith said. “Thank you… and I think I’m going to stay here for a while.”

“It’s fine, and I think that’s the best choice for a druid like you who loves hot spring water because it makes your body recover faster.” Aisella giggled. “We’re leaving first, okay?”

Nerith nodded while looking at Aisella, with Iris leaving the hot spring without pushing further, which was one of the things she had always appreciated about Aisella: the instinct for when to stay close and when to leave room.

She closed her eyes again.

The steam swirled around her, and the sounds from the men’s side of the hot spring carried through the bamboo in a comfortable tone, reminiscent of people who had endured a challenging day and were processing it in the most natural way: without agenda, without urgency, just the low back-and-forth of voices that didn’t need to mean anything.

She heard Rex’s voice briefly among them, saying something short and dry that made Apollo laugh, and the sound of it settled into the space behind her sternum in a way she noted and did not examine too closely.

’Complicated,’ she thought again.

Nerith looked at her body. “I remember that Rex was having his way to my body…”

“But why… why does it feel like something is missing with it?”

“I’m immature for not having a straight thought about this, but…”

“I want to replace all of Rex’s bad memories from the dream with something gentle…”

“The only way to do it by doing it by myself… while trying to think about him…”

“I’m sorry, mother nature… for what I’m about to do… it’s for my own good.”

The steam clung to Nerith’s skin like a warm, damp veil, blurring the edges of the world until there was nothing left but the heat of the spring and the intrusive, rhythmic thumping of her own heart.

She leaned her head back against the smooth stone, her naturally green hair spreading across the surface like spilled silk. Her leaves, usually vibrant and steady, began to quiver and curl at the edges, a silent, botanical confession of the turmoil brewing within her.

’This is the only way to make my body feel normal again…’

’I know that it wasn’t supposed to be like that,’ she whispered to herself, her eyes fluttering shut as the memory of the dream clawed at her mind. ’It was too fast… too rough… too much like a storm that wanted to break me.’

In the darkness of her eyelids, the image of Rex appeared. But she didn’t let the old version of him, the one from the nightmare, take hold.

She reached into the void of her mind and began to reshape him. She took the terrifying strength of his silhouette and softened it.

’I want a gentle Rex that can slowly change my mind… to remove the trauma from what he did in my nightmare.’ She took the memory of his dominance and reframed it with the gentleness of the forest breeze.

’No… not like that, Rex,’ she thought, her breath hitching as she slid a hand beneath the surface of the water. ’I want the gentle Rex to look at me… not through the Rex that raped me.”

“I want to feel his hands like sunlight shining on my plants, not like a cage…’

Her fingers, slender and trembling, finally found the swollen, aching center of her pleasure. As she touched herself, she forced the mental image to shift.

Instead of the violent, unrelenting force of the dream, she visualized Rex kneeling before her in a meadow of soft moss. In her mind, his blonde hair was tousled by a light wind, and his golden eyes weren’t filled with hunger but with a profound, soul-deep reverence.

“Ahhh… hnn…” A soft, melodic moan escaped her lips, lost to the bubbling of the spring. “Yes… I like it that way…”

“I want Rex to go gentle on me…”

She began to move her fingers in slow, deliberate circles, mimicking the rhythm of a heartbeat. Every time the old, jagged memory of the rape tried to resurface, she crushed it with a new sensation.

She imagined his tanned, muscular hands—those hands that had gripped limestone and fought monsters—now tracing the curve of her waist with the lightness of a falling leaf. “Mmpphhh… this is so embarrassing, but… I want to remove the nightmare by doing this with the gentle Rex…”

’Yes… just like that,’ she urged herself, her hips beginning to tilt involuntarily toward her hand. ’Imagine his weight… but not crushing me.’

’Imagine him holding me so tightly that the rest of the world disappears, but so softly that I feel like a flower in bloom.’

The friction intensified. Her internal walls, slick and pulsing, seemed to reach out for the phantom touch of a man who wasn’t there.

Her leaves began to flush a deeper, more intense shade of jade, curling tight against her skin as her arousal spiked. She could almost feel the ghost of his massive cock not tearing into her, but filling her with a warmth that matched the hot spring.

“Rex…” she whimpered, the name a prayer and a plea. “Please… be gentle… ”

“…just once…”

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