He and It Chapter 9: The King’s Pearl (9)

Chapter 9: The King’s Pearl (9)

Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations

Editor: KarateChopMonkey

Jiang Mian broke down and covered his face.

“I’m teasing you, human.”

The mermaid’s lips didn’t move, but a tiny wave of sound burrowed into Jiang Mian’s earholes and vibrated along his skull.

“I’ll talk to you alone, so they can’t hear me.”

The sensation was peculiar and surprised Jiang Mian. The precision of the mermaid’s control over sound was something that only a person who had experienced it could know how frightening it was.

So, the experimental station really can’t hear what Raperth really wanted to say? I wonder if the “voice into the secret” spoken of in some novels is so… 

Jiang Mian rubbed his cheeks — his hands were still hot and burning —, and looked into Raperth’s eyes inquiringly, and said matter-of-factly, “Well, let’s get back to business and look at the next unit…”

The mermaid seemed to find it very interesting to whisper in secret, under many eyes and ears. He stared closely at Jiang Mian and grinned, “Busted? No.”

“Yeah.” Jiang Mian nodded, “As you can see, poetry has always been the fruit of condensed human emotions. Our poets are used to expressing profound, condensed emotions in a very short space and in a very few words, such as the following—”

“Seventeen days ago, I was tracking whale-hunting boats, two human boats.” Raperth spoke, “They poached and absconded; and I found them and intercepted.”

Jiang Mian calmed his breathing as quickly as possible, moistening his dry lips as he tried his best to recite slowly, “Beloved, may we be a pair of white birds on the tip of a wave. The meteor has not yet fallen, we are tired of its shining…”

Two whaling ships? That sounds a bit familiar.

“One’s blue, one’s black, the black one’s bigger than the blue one,” Raperth said absentmindedly, scraping the rubber glove Jiang Mian had dropped with a chipped gold-tipped nail, “and I screwed up the blue one, and half of the black one, and I was… Careless.”

“…The sky hangs low, the ghostly light of that blue star in the morning sun,” Jiang Mian’s lips twitched slightly, staring thoughtfully at his book, “awakening in you and me, my dear, a strand of undying sorrow.”

——Blue, black, no mistake, those are the whaling ships belonging to the Sigma Institute. The blue one is the Lucky Star, equipped with a 3,000 horsepower motor-driven propeller, and was the titular research vessel for Ted’s project team before the mermaid encounter; the black one is the Pegasus, larger than the Lucky Star, with more than 5000 horsepower.

As it turns out, they hadn’t been transferred.

Raperth continued, “Hunting isn’t about carelessness, and I paid the price of it by being careless.”

He swung his tail slowly, and the huge wounds have long since stopped bleeding, but they still looked ghastly.

Jiang Mian pointed to the words in the book, “So, what does this mean?”

He needed a more detailed explanation.

“I don’t know!” The mermaid replied loudly, whispering, “On the ship… There was a thing spinning fast, used to push the ship forward or something. I was hit by an elliptical black bullet and crashed into it.”

Jiang Mian didn’t say anything for a while, onlookers might have thought he was choking on the mermaid’s blunt answer, yet he stared at the beige pages of the poem, and the only thing inside him was shock. The mermaid couldn’t lie, he didn’t bother with clever cover-ups at all. Therefore, he actually destroyed the “Lucky Star” and then was accidentally hit head-on by the “Pegasus” torpedo and smashed into the drive propeller.

Even so, the Pegasus still suffered the fate of being transferred and mysteriously disappeared along with the Lucky Star, never to be seen again.

On the other hand, what was left of Raperth? Fourteen wounds that have never healed?

The price was so light, so horribly light, compared to the end of two high-powered whaling ships.

“…It’s okay, we’ll read the poem and understand it together.” Jiang Mian reluctantly said.

“Dew-wet lilies and roses, a sleepy glimpse escapes; ah, dear, don’t dream of the shooting star’s dazzling flash, nor of the blue star’s ghostly light, lingering low in the dew-drops.”

Raperth replied honestly, “I lost consciousness for a time… when I woke up again, I was here.”

He looked at his fishtail and grunted, “This mark of shame has to stay for now. It doesn’t fit, but I’ll remember the lesson.”

“May we turn into white birds on the tip of the wave, I…” Jiang Mian choked for a moment, as if struck by the depth of feeling between the lines, “me and you. My heart haunts the countless islands, and the Danan Lakeshore…”

——So, Fabian is just a scavenger?

…It wasn’t hard to imagine that when the German received the news of the two whalers’ wreckage and rushed to clean up the mess, a seriously injured and unconscious Raperth was like a huge pie falling from the sky, smashing him in a solid pile.

Then, there was a reasonable explanation for many things.

——Why the group’s top management didn’t arrive at the Institute in the first place;

——Why Fabian didn’t move against Raperth in a hurry, in the same way as he had done with the last mermaid, and even some of his methods seemed rather lenient;

——Such severe defensive measures, such complex punitive measures… What exactly was protected and what was feared?

Fabian… He really knew how terrible power the mermaid king heir really possessed, he had seen with his own eyes the sunken, burning wreckage of two whaling ships, yet he kept it all from the Group, even the Group’s executive officer might not be aware of what kind of monster was being held in the Institute.

“…There, the years will forget us, and sorrow will come no more; and in an instant, away from the encroachment of roses, lilies and starlight—”

At this moment, Jiang Mian looked at Raperth, he gazed into his seemingly ever straightforward, ever unobtrusive eyes, and was tempted to ask the mermaid a question.

You are fully capable of tearing open the human cage and leaving here completely, why do you stay then?

A thousand words crowded his heart, and Jiang Mian said softly, “—as long as we are two white birds, my dear, out in the waves.”

But he didn’t dare to ask, and he couldn’t ask.

—

Because of the mermaid’s treatment of him, Jiang Mian walked around the observation room with ten percent more privileges than normal, although not yet directly involved in the core experimental team, but compared to his previous situation, it could indeed be described as a difference.

At the moment, the young man was pacing anxiously in his room, a small one-room apartment with a small kitchen, which he had decided to live in after the death of Jiang Pingyang. Compared with the generous conditions of living with his adoptive father in the past, it was indeed a far cry, but for living alone it was enough.

He encountered a difficult bottleneck when he was deciphering the slate book.

The mermaid script was somewhere between epigraphic and ideographic, with both hieroglyphic parts and a trivial structure similar to phonetic symbols. They were elegant and undoubtedly complex, with numerous wavy curves and teardrop-shaped dots depicting the contents of the lithographies, which from a distance looked more like a beautifully woven pair of French lace than a narrative character.

Jiang Mian used his authority to access a large number of long-sealed internal documents, and combined them with Jiang Pingyang’s conjectures before his death, trying to interpret the permutations, but the secrets of an unfamiliar civilization still shut him out, making it inaccessible.

Jiang Mian gnawed anxiously on his pen, his lips wriggling as he unconsciously murmured the pronunciation of his imaginary mermaid script, from the regular and clear vowel consonants to the haphazard smacking of a baby’s speech, his tongue rolling over many mixed codes.

The original slate book was destroyed long ago, and only the image photo survived. Jiang Mian stared at the layers of intricate patterns on it, pulled out its virtual model, and suddenly a light came to his mind.

——What if it wasn’t for reading, but a musical instrument, a tool that relied on external force to make sound?

The more he thought about it, the more he felt that this guess was plausible, but he was just struggling to verify it, when a thought crept into his mind, landed in a moment, and took root in a moment.

Maybe… Could I ask Raperth for advice?

As soon as the idea appeared, it was like a floodgate opening. These days, he could already speak a lot of human vocabulary, and learn it quickly and well, so if he revealed part of the contents of the slate book to consult the mermaid… 

He was so close to the truth that what Jiang Pingyang had studied for more than a decade and had found nothing, was now ripe and within reach because of Raperth’s arrival. Jiang Mian’s throat was dry with nervousness and eagerness, and he eagerly cropped the photos, printed them out, and hastily clipped them into his notebook before dashing out of the room.

It was late at night, the corridors were quiet, all was silent, and even the brightly lit Sigma Experiment Station had few people left, and Jiang Mian stood at the closed alloy door, anxiously waiting for his identity to be verified.

The door opened, and Jiang Mian was relieved that he had never tried to enter the observation room at this time of night. The guards saw him and knew that he was now the only handler of the experiment, and didn’t come forward to stop him.

The cage water sparkled under the night light, emitting an almost dreamy blue light. The male mermaid, who originally closed his eyes, sensing the sound of the visitor’s hurried footsteps, also turned a gap lid membrane, staring at Jiang Mian without turning his eyes.

The youth ran eagerly up to the platform, hands on the edge of the water, with his cheeks flushed.

He was merely wearing pajamas, without even the most basic extermination, he dared to get up close and personal with the massive, ferocious beast. The guard team watched from afar, they have long been accustomed to silence, in the Sigma Group to do all kinds of hanging weird and bizarre dirty work, however, seeing this scene, thinking back to the past week was shoveled into the body bag of fragmented limbs, they still in the heart of a lament: really crazy.

The mermaid made a sigh of relief in the water.

[Feeding, drinking, resting,] his fishtail flicked, his long luxuriously dark hair curling diffusely in the water, [This isn’t the biological clock humans should have, Pearl. It’s time for you to sleep.]

But Pearl just bounced excitedly, lips opening and closing adorably, spitting out fast flowing notes — he called to him, and his eyes sparkled.

Raperth couldn’t resist but to float to the surface.

“What for, human?” Raperth said with deliberate malevolence, “Give the reason for the disturbance.”

Right now, he had mastered a lot of land dweller phrases, and by the time he could communicate fluently with the small human, he would be able to leave the place with a guide.

Although at the moment of departure, a revenge killing would be inevitable, but before that, he should hide the little human to a safe place first.

“I… I was thinking,” the mermaid’s feigned repulsion couldn’t douse the fire of Jiang Mian’s excitement, he had suffered more than a dozen times more blows in the past than this, and the youth fumbled to pull a pile of paper from his notebook, “Can you answer my doubts? Because I’m really trying to figure this out, there are written records about mermaids…”

Raperth narrowed his eyes as he shook the water off his ear fins, not looking at what Jiang Mian held out, but staring at the human first.

“You, learning from me?” He picked through his currently barren vocabulary of available words as a way to get his point across.

Jiang Mian nodded, “Please enlighten me.”

“Please,” the mermaid repeated, “ask me for advice.”

Ha, Fluffy, naive, ignorant, and with an empty little head. Species in the abyss understand that one should never pray for a deal with a mermaid unless death would be the best outcome, for they enjoy the pleasure of tearing through the chase and love to see their self-proclaimed wise prey struggle in their dying… 

“Yes, yes!” Jiang Mian nodded vigorously, trying to give the male mermaid his best puppy dog eyes, eyebrows piled up, lips puckered, ebony eyes watering, “Please?”

Raperth, “…”

The mermaid’s tail froze and his mind went down for a short while at the same time. It was only when he slowly sank and the water flooded past his chin that he blinked, flicked his tail, and floated back up.

…What kind of power is this?

The scales on his spine were moving, and his fins began to shake sharply… What was going on… what was wrong with him?

“Begging you?” Seeing the mermaid frozen, Jiang Mian begged once more, this time with a softer tone and a more pitiful look in his eyes, almost like a true puppy whimper, “Please, please…”

Raperth’s two rigid hearts fluttered and rebounded wildly inside his chest, and the mermaid, almost panicked, pressed against his sternum and hissed, “…Stop!”

Jiang Mian immediately closed his lips tightly and his shoulders collapsed as he sighed in frustration.

“You don’t want to, do you?”

Jiang Mian rubbed his cheek, lost, but he completely understood. If it were him, losing his freedom and dignity, locked up in this prison, being treated like a beast and observed back and forth from on high, not to mention the fact that there were more bandits eyeing his flesh and blood and genes… He didn’t think he would agree to this insolent request. What was the point of helping the enemy to learn the secrets of his own civilization?

The heartfelt excitement washed away as Jiang Mian sat up straight and looked guiltily at the mermaid.

“I’m sorry, I was thinking selfishly,” Jiang Mian whispered, “I’m sorry.”

Raperth frowned at him with a serious look: [It’s not you, it’s something wrong with my body organs. After we leave here, I’ll just dig it out and see.]

The mermaid’s language was like a delicate song, Raperth’s voice was even lower and clearer, right as he was comforting himself, Jiang Mian just shyly smiled.

“You can ask me for advice,” surprisingly, Raperth dropped his hand and actually agreed to Jiang Mian’s plea, “But… different groups, there are different words… I do not know them all. Then, there are conditions.”

Jiang Mian was overjoyed, his whole face was instantly lit up, “What are the conditions? Please tell me!”

Raperth smiled cunningly, revealing a line of sharp white teeth, “Not now, not tonight.”

He probed a large, bony hand, his sharp, pointed nails scraping lightly against the brittle, hard paper with a clicking sound, and Jiang Mian moved back hastily to avoid contact with him.

The mermaid’s movements were halting, and a grunt rolled in his throat, emitting a disgruntled complaint. He grabbed the page and stubbornly chased Jiang Mian’s hand with his fingers, poking it lightly several times, causing the dodging youth to yelp.

Jiang Mian covered his red and burning skin and whispered a rebuke, “You… You’re so childish.”

Raperth twisted his softening fingers, his ear fins flapping proudly, pretending not to hear the little human’s whining. He flipped open the paper, perusing the arcane, ineffable patterns, the water stains that should have seeped into the paper’s fibers slipping away in drops as if they were touching the glass surface.

The mermaid slowly narrowed his eyes, the banter gone, the warmth faded, and the longer he looked, the more unpleasant the aura around him.

[This is the writing of the kings.] Raperth said in a deep voice.

His face was cold and indifferent, like inorganic marble carved, [Fragmented, pinched… There’s no other possibility of outflow except the act of theft.]

Jiang Mian watched the mermaid king’s reaction uneasily, trying to see something in his eyes, but Raperth’s eyes were motionless and impeccable, like a cold, hard iron mirror.

“How did you get that?” Raperth raised his eyes and arched his spine slightly, the tip of his scarlet tongue darting quickly across his lips like a hissing snake’s letter. His dark, sharp nails slowly nestled into the paper, and for the first time he looked at the human in front of him with the same gaze he used for his prey.

“Answer the question, human,” his voice rolled low like muffled thunder, “Are you a thief?”