He and It Chapter 10: The King’s Pearl (10)

Chapter 10: The King’s Pearl (10)

Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations

Editor: KarateChopMonkey

Jiang Mian’s blood rushed to his head and face, and then continued to his limbs and bones with the same rapidity.

One moment, his thin face was red as a burn from the mermaid’s unrelenting questioning, and the next, the oppressive feeling of witnessing a top predator reveal its fangs before his eyes made his face as pale as paper.

“I… I’m not…” His breathing was broken and faint, his heart filled with panic — no, not just trembling and awe, but something else, something harsher, that seemed to hit him on a soul level.

Jiang Mian couldn’t help but flinch in the face of Raperth’s abhorrent anger. He clenched his teeth hard, his teeth chattering as if he were immersed in ice water. Except for the skin that the mermaid had just touched, where it was burning hot and sore, comparable to being stuck with a branding iron, so hot that he couldn’t breathe.

What’s wrong with me? Jiang Mian asked himself in a panic, he tried to justify himself, but as soon as he opened his mouth, the choke of fear rolled out of his throat like a hiccup. He winced once, followed by a second and a third.

The angry male mermaid in front of him seemed to be emitting a smell… A smell he couldn’t understand, had never smelled before, but it was there. They were like rumbling, horrible thunder clouds, pressing heavily on the inside of Jiang Mian’s nasal cavity, stabbing his brain so hard that he wanted to curl up tightly into a ball and retreat into a corner where no one knew.

Jiang Mian’s reason told himself: run away, this situation is too wrong, maybe afterwards you have to do a medical examination, you have been avoiding it for years, it’s time to face the results of the medical examination; but the emotional part of his heart couldn’t help but fearfully ask aloud: how can he accuse me of something I didn’t do at all and become angry at me?

“What’s wrong with me?” He covered his eyes, unwilling to let the mermaid see the tears that spilled from the sting, “My body… What’s wrong with me?”

The male mermaid was already stunned.

[You wailed.] He whispered.

But in theory, this was an impossible thing to do, because only the young, and the weaker party in a partnership would wail like this. They will emit an extremely specific, mournful sound from the chest, and then emit the smell of painful sadness to vent how hurt they were. However, this behavior was nothing less than a masterful manipulation tactic in the eyes of the Raperth of old.

He had seen too many times how wailing pups made their elders’ hearts burn, and how wailing mermaids drove their mates crazy. And let’s not even mention the pups that need protection — no matter how out of control, how furious or ecstatic they were going through earlier, male mermaids smell their mates in pain and immediately have to leave everything behind and come to each other, eager to be with, eager to please.

If you add to this the sobbing, the whimpering, the grunting… 

If diving to the deepest depths of the abyss, to hunt the oldest ichthyosaur, you could make your partner smile again, then the male mermaid wouldn’t hesitate to do it.

At this moment, Raperth finally experienced for himself the power of wailing. Jiang Mian’s breath was like a boiled sugar cube, burnt and bitter, dripping hot on the male mermaid’s scent sac, making Raperth’s body tense up, and the uncontrolled sobbing made him retract his claws, instinctively softening his fins and shaking his scales to appear as harmless as possible.

He immediately gave up his intention to press the issue, with a raw, gentle little purr in his throat, and the smell emanating from his scent glands became more soothing than ever.

Jiang Mian was crying in a daze, but another distinctive fragrance quietly enveloped him, it was soft like a cloud, gently caressing the tip of Jiang Mian’s nose, full of salty sea breeze, clear ocean currents, and grand sunshine, really fragrant, really warm, as if a miracle, making him fall into a dream.

Jiang Mian’s eyes were swollen and he was dizzy and mumbling in his mind, but he was a mermaid… He shouldn’t smell so good.

The male mermaid was lying in front of the feeding port, purring at him, and with the incredible aroma, Jiang Mian was almost melting into a puddle of gooey fluff. He leaned against the railing, his skin was hot, his cheeks were red, and he didn’t even have the strength to get up.

He was so cozy.

Sensing that he was no longer frightened or sad, Raperth was relieved and looked at Jiang Mian with an odd look.

It was indeed a strange thing, but it also explained a lot of questions: why he had looked at this human when he first met him, the way he spoke, his voice and tone, his appearance, his smell… And in more indefinable and unexplained ways, not as unbearable as the rest of the land folk.

Raperth could look at those humans with the eyes of prey, but couldn’t do the same with Jiang Mian, whom he called “Pearl” in his mind, and often had the odd thought that he wanted to stuff this skinny thing with food, hold it in his hands, and hold him to see if it had weight. As early as he knew nothing about Jiang Mian, Raperth was determined to have this strange human as his guide, even going so far as to wait six days for him. During those days floating alone in the cage, the mermaid always convinced himself with a very reluctant reason: the land wasn’t easy to mov one, and he lost the coordinates of Jiang Mian. To start a massacre in such a situation, in case his guide was hurt what would he do?

Now, he finally understood, Jiang Mian must have hidden mermaid blood in his body, to call him subconsciously indulge in leniency.

…Well, perhaps, it had a little something to do with the fact that he was particularly cute.

Only a little.

[Then, you should be a mixed-blood mermaid.] Raperth looked at him thoughtfully, [Poor thing, how did you end up here without being discovered by that group of land people?]

Jiang Mian slowly regained some strength, he couldn’t understand Raperth’s sentimental whisper, only that the mermaid didn’t seem angry. He murmured vaguely, “Sorry, I lost my temper.”

“How did you… how did you manage to get it?” Now that Raperth had discovered Jiang Mian’s true identity, he was naturally much more forgiving of the mistake Jiang Mian had made. After all, this was merely a wandering pup, completely uneducated in the sea, who naturally had no idea what the consequences of stealing the royal family’s paperwork would be.

Jiang Mian built up his strength and hurriedly explained, “This is what Jiang— I mean, my adoptive father left behind, the original has long been destroyed, only a few pictures remain. We call it ‘slate book’.”

Raperth didn’t say anything, and Jiang Mian stole a look at him and said carefully, “I’m not sure what it took for my father to get it, but it’s been at the Institute almost as long as I’ve been here. My father spent a great deal of time deciphering it, and still came up empty. Now that he’s gone…”

Jiang Mian took a deep breath, “…With him gone, the burden of responsibility for it falls on me.”

He picked up the fallen copy on the ground with his still soft fingers and pointed at it, “According to my guess, maybe the previous research is wrong, it’s not actually a type of text to read, but a sound instrument. Like the flute, when people play the flute, the wind door produces a collision of the gas vortex, and the piper through the collision of the gas vortex sounds makes the tune. I think, if we change to a lithographed book, the airflow will also be replaced by water flow… Would it be able to explain the special features of the slate book?”

Raperth looked at him in amazement and exclaimed, “You’re very clever.”

Jiang Mian’s heart tightened and he hurriedly asked, “Did I guess correctly?”

However, Raperth didn’t answer the question, but asked, “You said your foster father… is no longer here. Then where is he?”

“He’s gone.” Jiang Mian averted his eyes and said softly.

Raperth frowned, “Where did he go?”

Jiang Mian was stunned, he looked up at the mermaid, seemingly not expecting such a response. The youth looked at the mermaid for a long time and then suddenly smiled.

In fact, Jiang Pingyang went in a hurry, and Jiang Mian still remembered that day, no wind and no rain, the climate was warm, it was a most unusual and quiet day. The old man was wearing his usual dark brown old tweed jacket, no ID card in his breast pocket, only an old fountain pen with gold paint and an old cap. It was the noon break, Jiang Mian didn’t have an appetite, so Jiang Pingyang asked for a large bowl of scallion noodles, two eggs lying on the surface, one for him, one for Jiang Mian, but even though it was only a bite, he could no longer eat it.

That day, Jiang Mian waited for hours in front of the emergency room, from daylight until dark. He hated the Sigma Institute, yet at that moment he had to pray to it, praying that it would save his father’s life and the only person he had ever known in the world.

But a long time later, he suddenly realized that, in fact, people’s lives were neither long nor short, and many people had already seen the last of each other in their lives long ago, and the world was predictable and never empty.

Since Jiang Pingyang left, he had never personally placed the words “death” and “foster father” side by side, as if this way, he could pretend that his last loved one was still with him. Often, when members of the Institute returned from their voyages, they would curiously ask him “Why isn’t Dr. Jiang here?”, and then Jiang Mian would answer indifferently, “He’s gone.”

People who got this response, either sincerely or falsely, always said they were sorry for their loss, and those who were closer would sorrowfully reminisce with Jiang Mian for a long time, “It’s a pity that Dr. Jiang didn’t drink the immortal water. He was such a good and responsible person before he died!”

Jiang Mian only laughed in his heart when he heard that perhaps Jiang Pingyang was a good man, but the minimum standard for being a good man was precisely that he never took the immortal water.

Now, Raperth looked at him with a serious tone and a puzzled face, and Jiang Mian thought, maybe in the world of mermaids, death was always such a straightforward and natural thing, no need to cover up and no need to be pedantic, compared to the greed of human beings due to the unwillingness to give up, and even catalyzed the monstrous creation of climbing to immortality, so what else he had to cover up and be pedantic?

Jiang Mian slowly stopped smiling, and his gaze, as if falling in an extremely distant place, he said, “He died, three months ago.”

Raperth’s irises faintly flickered, Jiang Mian sighed, he didn’t say this to anyone in the Institute, he also didn’t care to say it to those people, but with the mermaid, he was able to put down all his defenses, and told him, “Honestly, the death of my adoptive father… hit me really hard. The moment I received the news of his death, I thought I was dreaming, but in the second half of the night, I suddenly had a panic attack, which directly triggered angina…” He laughed bitterly, “…the pain…as if I was going to go with him.”