"Useful and stupid often overlap," Lin Yi observed calmly, still challenging her black-and-white view of the world.
She stared at him for two full breaths, her gaze piercing, as if trying to see into the very core of his being, to understand the motivations behind his casual audacity. She felt a profound sense of exasperation.
"I truly cannot decide," she finally admitted, her voice tinged with a rare note of genuine perplexity, "whether you are incredibly reckless, or supremely confident." The line between the two, in his case, seemed impossibly blurred.
"Those overlap too," he offered, maintaining his unruffled demeanor, a subtle quirk of his lips.
That particular comment, delivered with such nonchalant certainty, almost managed to draw a genuine smile from her. A fleeting glimmer of amusement touched her features, a softening around her eyes, though it vanished as quickly as it appeared, suppressed before it could fully blossom.
