He and It Chapter 85: Dark Sky Sanctuary (20)

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Addis note: This book ends with chapter 104.

Chapter 85: Dark Sky Sanctuary (20)

Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations

Editor: GaeaTiamat

 

Sevenfold Eyes shut up for a moment.

He was quiet as a chicken. For a moment he envied Gao’er’s ability to shrink and disappear in the darkness of the night, turning into…into a puddle of whatever, and then disappearing without a trace.

Yu Mengzhou finally straightened his tongue as he blurted out, “–No! That’s not flirt…”

He urgently glanced around, then lowered his voice, and emphasized to Deathstar, “…That’s not flirting! Absolutely not!”

Deathstar asked in surprise, “Really?”

“One hundred percent!” Yu Mengzhou said fiercely. “You think that by comforting you, saying nice things to you, patting your body, scratching your chin, rubbing your stomach, I’m flirting? Jesus, you’re all horses!”

Deathstar frowned in disbelief. If he had two eyebrows, then he would have furrowed them.

Yu Mengzhou said helplessly, “I know you’re not like any of the horses I’ve seen on earth. You’re intelligent and capable, but if what I’m doing is some kind of ‘flirting’ in your eyes, then I’ll never do it again…”

“Please don’t!” Sevenfold Eyes couldn’t hold back any longer, and jumped to his feet and begged. When Yu Mengzhou looked at it incredulously, it immediately went quiet again.

“Do you all understand?” Yu Mengzhou asked softly.

Sevenfold Eyes’ tail was all but clenched between his legs in fear, while the snake’s tail wrapped timidly around one side of his leg bone. He chewed on his lip in a panicked manner, grunted half-heartedly, and squeezed out a few words in a whisper, “I…I don’t know…”

Yu Mengzhou narrowed his eyes.

“We know that it’s for a reason, but what if you don’t know we’re actually embarrassed to pick a fight with you!”

He took a long breath. Sevenfold Eyes once again hated that he wasn’t Blasphe. He hated to admit it, but Blasphe was right. Deciphering mysteries and all that was indeed hard!

Yu Mengzhou’s heart said, it’s not what it feels like.

Sad? There is one.

Want to be quiet? Yes.

Embarrassed? Too much.

If these Demon Horses couldn’t talk, couldn’t laugh at him, couldn’t feel sad, couldn’t be upset, didn’t ever possess a love/hate stronger than a human’s…Then flirting would be fine, really. An animal like a horse, already possessed a great deal of emotion, and he had a quality that had attracted the favor of hoofed animals since he was a child, so if intimacy was enough to give them a sense of security, and they dutifully handed their hooves to him to repair, why shouldn’t it be like that?

However, it shouldn’t be like this, it shouldn’t be…

He sighed, and turned his head to stare at the parasitic thing on Deathstar.

“Let’s fix this. We’ll talk about the rest later.”

Sevenfold Eyes wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or more wary.

Deathstar looked at Yu Mengzhou thoughtfully, and suddenly said affirmatively, “But you really are quite a loving human.”

Yu Mengzhou, “?”

Sevenfold Eyes really wanted to kick him to death.

Yu Mengzhou shook his head, he ignored Sevenfold Eyes who ran away in a puff of smoke and continued to tug on the vines with his pincers. Those living creatures were intertwined and firmly connected to the spell pegs. They resided in an ecology where the two were interdependent. He tried to fix the Demon Horse’s hooves in a less drastic way.

“There’s no need to be careful,” Deathstar added, as if he knew what he was thinking. “I’ve observed this many times, and the force with which you use your tools is no match for the tormentors, who carried out tortures on us that are more than you can imagine. Therefore, I will not pretend to be in pain…”

Yu Mengzhou looked up and mused, ” One second.”

Deathstar, “Huh?”

“What do you mean, ‘pretend to be in pain’?” He asked suspiciously.

“When you pull out the spell spike, that’s when it should feel the strongest.” Deathstar said with certainty. “But sucking, weak legs, sweating…I think there’s a high probability that these manifestations are to gain your sympathy as a way to get more pity.”

Yu Mengzhou was more than a little confused. He didn’t know what to say.

“However, it’s also the fact that they love you,” Deathstar said gruffly. “Dang, I love you too, I just don’t think I can act like them.”

Yu Mengzhou inhaled deeply. He could finally empathize with the other Demon Horses’ helplessness.

“There!” He held up a hand. “Just…Just stop talking, okay? I’ll comfort you all whether you’re in pain or not.”

Deathstar was confused, “Why?”

Yu Mengzhou switched to his hoof knife, and he said absentmindedly as he peeled at the branches of the flailing vines, “Because I can’t bear to watch, and I’m doing it to keep myself grounded. It also makes me happy to see you happy. Nothing more.”

Deathstar was quiet for a long while.

Taking advantage of his silence, Yu Mengzhou hurriedly accelerated his movements. He pulled the vine that tried to bite him and shoveled down to the roots of the plant. The regenerative ability of the thing was really amazing. After half a day of scooping and laying a thick layer of broken branches under his feet, he still couldn’t see that it had subsided.

Just when he was annoyed, something pulled the apron belt behind his waist.

Yu Mengzhou turned his head to see that it was Falchion.

Tugging him gently back, the herd’s chief spat a stream of extremely hot flames that burned the parasitic mother that cowered inside the hoof, which left only the tips of the spell spikes breaking through the walls of the bare hooves.

“They are afraid of high temperatures, but they will not be burned to death by the heat. They will only temporarily shrink into the host’s interior,” Falchion explained. “Getting rid of the spell nails is the most prudent step.”

Yu Mengzhou nodded his head, and after a long while, the heat wave caused by Falchion subsided to the point where it was harmless to humans. He went through the steps, pulling out the spell nails of the front hoof one by one, and then picked the holes with slim tweezers, as he borrowed the light. The parasite had gnawed and drilled holes all the way into the hollow hoof bone interior, where he reached in and squarely yanked out the shrunken mother plant.

This thing was like a disjointed, very elastic, thick-skinned sarcoma, and the moment it was completely dislodged, Yu Mengzhou even hallucinated the crisp sound of a wine cork being removed.

Following that method, he finished Deathstar’s remaining hooves in turn, cleaned the soles of his hooves again, wiped the black blood that kept flowing, and wrapped them in gauze.

“There.” He smiled, still affectionately and without compartmentalization, and touched the end of Deathstar’s nose. “How does it feel?”

“…Pretty good,” Deathstar said sullenly. “Couldn’t be better.”

The pitch-black demon horse hung his head down. He rustily dropped his head down next to Yu Mengzhou’s hand. Yu Mengzhou rubbed his forehead, and when he retracted his palm, Deathstar raised his head and said, “The chief has something to say to you, so I’m going to go now.”

After saying that, he really turned his head and left, so determined that he couldn’t be more resolute.

Falchion sighed, “He’s right, I do have something to say to you.”

Yu Mengzhou shoved his gloves haphazardly into his pocket. Perhaps infected by Deathstar, he became unusually direct in his speech, “Is it about flirting?”

Falchion whispered, “Yes.”

“So…are you here to explain to me why you all knew something was wrong with my movements and words and actions, but didn’t even tell me a word about it?”

Falchion inclined his head and asked gently, “Walk with me, will you?”

Yu Mengzhou said, “Let’s take a walk. After standing for so long, it’s time for me to move my body.”

He habitually held Falchion’s reins, and Falchion followed him. One person and one horse wobbled along the wilderness.

“Have you ever wondered why the herd refers to each other as brothers?” Falchion remarked.

Yu Mengzhou mused, “Uh, I mean, is it because you’re all males…?”

Falchion was genuinely amused by him.

“No, it’s obvious that we’re all males,” said the Demon Horse. “But in fact, at the moment of our original birth, we were only surrounded by flames, and had no other fixed form. Our so-called gender was just a choice we made for ourselves.”

“It is the instinct of living beings to avoid harm, and in the case of demons, this instinct is even more pronounced. The moment we were bound to form by Angola and reduced to servitude, all of our choices had to be all unified for the herd could not allow him to hold the power to breed an heir.” Falchion seemed to be slipping into remembrance. “So, for quite some time, he kept giving orders to try and lure us with subjects under his command to give birth to demonic warhorse offspring for him to drive in a steady stream.”

“Oh,” Yu Mengzhou caught on. “Wow, that’s really…”

“Male, female, or both sexes and neither sex. Countless chimeras, banshees, seducers…Or temptations, or compulsions, a hundred, unrelenting patterns, swarmed around us like moths on fire.” The Demon Horse spat his bloody tongue and swiped his sharp fangs. “-pity. He had to seek their bones underground.”

He looked back to Yu Mengzhou. “And your words, your actions…Indeed it is also what someone once did to us.”

“But trust me!” Falchion said hastily. “We have heard the sweetest words of hypocrisy, and the lowest and meanest insults. We have experienced the softest caresses, and the harshest tortures countless times, and we know you are quite different from them.”

“Perhaps in your world, your behavior couldn’t be more normal, but our perceptions have long been severely distorted. Ordinary getting along, or flirting…I’m sorry to say that we really have no way to tell the difference,” Falchion said lowly. “If you feel that our concealment is an offense, then I apologize to you, sincerely. I’m sorry.”

Yu Mengzhou didn’t speak.

At first, he had the raw feeling of being misunderstood, and the uncomfortable feeling of “isn’t it weird that you guys knew but didn’t say anything and instead enjoyed it?” However, now that raw thought had vanished.

He hadn’t thought about that angle, that the Demon Horses’ perception of intimacy was so dysfunctional that they didn’t realize that for humans, hugging and touching could be a very good thing, and that maybe they felt it as such, but in their minds it was still seduction, flirting, and sugar-coated poison.

“Well…” After thinking carefully, Yu Mengzhou didn’t dwell on it. “But you should be clear that I am comforting you all, not in an unkind way, but just from the bottom of my heart. Caring…my heart aches for you all.”

“I know,” Falchion lowered his head and rubbed Yu Mengzhou’s cheek affectionately. He buried his nose in his arms and drew in the scent that would enable him to let go of his hatred for a while and indulge in happiness instead. “You’re the best. So good it’s unimaginable. The best human I’ve ever seen.”

The demon horse’s voice, that hid a hint of insatiable salivation, spoke under a huge shadow, that was also flooded with a swamp-like, thick, boiling sound. Each exploded black bubble, hid peeping scarlet eyes and turned around bones, all of which were aimed at the youth’s tall figure.

However, Yu Mengzhou never realized it.

He smiled and touched the bridge of the Demon Horse’s nose, then remembered that his toolbox was still spread out. “So I’m going back? I’ve got to pack up my stuff.”

“”Okay,” Falchion said. “Watch your step when it’s this dark.”

As he said that, those eyes clustered in dark shadows on the ground, stared straight at him, and Yu Mengzhou waved his hand dismissively. “There’s a light. I can see the way!”

He gradually ran away. Falchion gazed at his back, along with the countless proliferation of crowded eyeballs that also chased the youth into the fortress, until he was no longer visible.

Deathstar came silently out of the shadows and probed, “I’m in trouble, aren’t I?”

Falchion didn’t look at him, “Close one.”

Just as he was about to shrink back, Falchion whispered, “Next time, remember to look those brothers of yours in the eye before you speak, hm?”

After he thought for a moment, Deathstar replied in a whisper, “All I can see is that they want to kick the shit out of me.”

 

“Then you deserve it,” Falchion said.