Stop Thinking Chapter 3: Raw Sushi Roll

Chapter 3: Raw Sushi Roll

Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations

Editor: Karai

In the study, Gu Xiuhan was reading a report on the improvement of a military-style mecha energy coordination module in front of a light screen.It wasn’t Gu Xiuhan’s job to deal with such trivial reports, especially since they had been approved months ago. He just wanted to give his brain something to do.

The blue glow of the module’s schematic diagram, with the explanatory text rapidly and densely sweeping across the retina, forced one to concentrate on other things. He didn’t want to, but he couldn’t help the “something else” that was barging in here.

Outside the door, the silent corridor came the sound of reeling wheels rattling. A few moments later, there were a few timid, yet clear knocks on the door.

It sounded like he was timid, worried that he would disturb the people inside, but he was so petulant that he had to enter the room if he wanted to, so he knocked carefully with just one knuckle.

Gu Xiuhan stopped, knowing that he could not hide, and could not pretend not to be there, so he walked slowly and pulled open the door.

“Brother Xiuhan,” Ruan Yu tilted his face, “good morning.”

Last night the fish tail was pressed comfortably, Ruan Yu slept well, and looked rich in blood and qi, and his cheeks like jade were permeated with powder, and he was smiling.

“Good morning.” Gu Xiuhan stood at the door and did not move, “What is it?”

He did not move, Ruan Yu maneuvered the mobility scooter like a small fish, through the gap between Gu Xiuhan and the door frame bared a little into the study.

Gu Xiuhan, “…”

Ruan Yu embraced a soft blanket rolled into a tube, moved down from the mobility scooter, flattened the blanket and laid it on the floor with one look, and said rightly, “I am here to keep you company.”

After the words, plopped down on the blanket, but also set aside a fist-sized portable silent humidifier, stuffed with a number of tablets, adjusted the spout to the fishtail.

The structure of the fishtail makes it difficult for the mermaid to maintain a sitting position for a long time… After all, the “fish butt” doesn’t really exist. That’s why Ruan Yu preferred to lie down or lie on his back when he was on shore.

After fiddling with the humidifier, Ruan Yu pulled out the book he planned to read today from the storage box of his mobility scooter, when he turned his head, he saw Gu Xiuhan still standing at the door, looking at him steadily, like he would spear the fish and throw it out of the door at any moment.

Ruan Yu was stunned, was stared at by the cool black pupils, stammering, but the words, “Shen, Aunt Shen let me come. …she has specially instructed me to keep you company when I have nothing to do…”

Shen Jingya was Gu Xiuhan’s mother, and was also the senior researcher who took the initiative to apply to the military ministry to place Ruan Yu in the Gu Family.

This action was not only for her son’s sake, but also because she felt pity for Ruan Yu. As a mother, she wanted this displaced young mermaid to grow up in a relatively normal environment, and Ruan Yu felt this sentiment, so Shen Jingya usually chanted something, Ruan Yu would seriously listen to it.

That includes, “Spend more time with your brother Xiuhan.”

That was what Shen Jingya said to Ruan Yu over lunch just now. She was not able to perceive the spiritual body like Ruan Yu, but she knew that her son was like his mother, Gu Xiuhan came back from the border star not quite right, seemed to have something on his mind, she could also vaguely detect. But she didn’t get nervous, she just thought it was because Gu Xiuhan was too lonely at the border for a year, so she casually mentioned it to Ruan Yu and asked him to spend more time with Gu Xiuhan when he had time.

The mental energy of mermaid royalty was so powerful that even without deliberately treating anything, just daily companionship and getting along could be beneficial to the organism’s spirit. As a result, Ruan Yu took the chicken feather as an arrow and was eager to be stationed around Gu Xiuhan.

Out of mermaid nature, Ruan Yu was clingy since childhood, which was judged from a human perspective as severe separation anxiety. After overcoming the fear of Gu Xiuhan, there was a time when Ruan Yu had to be carried by Gu Xiuhan wherever he went.

The young man with a sharp figure, black military uniform, cold look, but the small arm across the chest forever glued to a glutinous rice cake-like soft white young mermaid.

Considering that Gu Xiuhan required long-term stable spiritual healing, and his daily interaction with the mermaid could also play a considerable role in soothing, the Ministry of the Army acquiesced to this behavior similar to “taking children to work.”

Ruan Yu was very afraid at that time and had to bury his face in Gu Xiuhan’s shoulder to hide when he met people he didn’t know well. baby Ruan Yu slept a lot and sometimes he fell asleep on Gu Xiuhan’s shoulder when he wasn’t paying attention and woke up a few hours later with his little round face stamped with the stars and bars on Gu Xiuhan’s shoulder patch.

As a teenager, Gu Xiuhan said even less than he does now, and it was impossible to remind him, he would only glance at Ruan Yu from time to time in an unspecified way. As a result, Ruan Yu was often not informed in time, woke up and went home with his tail sticking out, until Shen Jingya snorted with laughter, Ruan Yu would realize that something was wrong, looked in the mirror and then covered his little round face with a blush, and went straight to Gu Xiuhan’s arms.

This kind of clinging habit was fine when he was young, but as Ruan Yu grew up, it became more and more inappropriate. So Gu Xiuhan was trying to change Ruan Yu’s habit of being overly dependent on him. Naturally… with little success.

“… I listened to Auntie Shen, so I came to keep you company.” Ruan Yu knew that he had a clingy habit, and he knew that Gu Xiuhan was always trying to fix him. He was still stammering, but when he remembered that he had Shen Jingya to protect him, he spoke louder and louder, and in the end, he even arrogantly turned the tables on him, “Why are you glaring at me?”

Gu Xiuhan moved his eyes away from the soft white nooks at the back of Ruan Yu’s waist, “I wasn’t staring.”

–That’s really not a stare.

Ruan Yu understood that Gu Xiuhan had conceded, so he took it easy and turned back to his book, using a marker to draw a line of emphasis.

Gu Xiuhan was silent for a moment, “I want to work.”

–If reviewing a report of chicken scratch from a few months ago was considered work.

Ruan Yu didn’t say a word, his head and tail tip nodding up and down in sync to show he was being absolutely quiet.

Gu Xiuhan insisted on shooing the fish, “Ruan Yu…”

He wasn’t sure that something like a mental dam was 100 percent secure, and he wouldn’t have returned to the capital star so early if he wasn’t worried about Ruan Yu getting into trouble during the important differentiation period.

Some thoughts that he shouldn’t have, he didn’t want Ruan Yu to know anyway.

Didn’t he want to work? Why are you talking again so soon? Ruan Yu turned his head and stared at Gu Xiuhan with a condemning look of an evil fish first, signaling him to be quiet.

“…” After a moment of silence, Gu Xiuhan’s face was so cold that ice could fall off, and the veins on the back of his hands surfaced shallowly, as if he had made up his mind, he suddenly took a big step towards Ruan Yu.

Ruan Yu went so abashed that the tail of the fish rolled.

Like a raw sushi roll.

Ruan Yu was not really afraid that Gu Xiuhan would beat him, not to mention hit him, Gu Xiuhan’s heart hurt the fish, but also his mental body was clearly a light gold color of joy, which indicated that he was happy that Ruan Yu came to accompany him. But Gu Xiuhan’s aura of being able to crush the leader of the alien species like a mole was too overwhelming, and Ruan Yu could not get used to it no matter how many times he saw it.

In the next second, Gu Xiuhan brushed past Ruan Yu with big steps. Then, he stood back in front of the light screen and continued to browse through the outdated reports.

Ruan Yu was as quiet as if he didn’t exist, dutifully flipping through the book. It was a reference book for general education courses in higher secondary schools. This volume was on social science topics, covering knowledge in the field of imperial economy and politics, and also had some mock questions for entrance exams to higher education institutions.

Ruan Yu tried to do a few of them, and he was quite successful.

The Gu family had treated Ruan Yu as their own child all these years. Ruan Yu’s limited mobility and rare bloodline made him inevitably coveted by others, and since he could not leave Gu Xiuhan, it was not realistic for him to live like an ordinary child. So Shen Jingya hired a tutor to teach Ruan Yu, using human schoolchildren of the same age as him as a reference for the teaching progress, but the progress could not be slowed down. After all, Ms. Shen did not want Ruan Yu to learn more about and integrate into the Imperial human civilization. Mermaid civilization had long been overturned, and there were few documents left, and few surviving people of the same race, so Ms. Shen did not want Ruan Yu’s spiritual world to have no place to return to.

As for Ruan Yu’s proposal to enter an institution of higher learning, it was Gu Xiuhan’s suggestion. This was not a whimsical idea, but when Ruan Yu was still young, the Imperial Comprehensive University, which ranked in the top three in the empire, had thrown an olive branch to Ruan Yu, inviting him to enter the spiritual healing program without examination.

The strong spiritual healing ability was a natural ability of mermaid royalty, so Ruan Yu had always relied only on instinct and intuition to heal people – of course, mermaid royalty relied on instinct alone to throw off a galaxy of healers who had worked so hard to learn the theory. However, if mermaid royalty had a wealth of theoretical knowledge, would his healing ability have taken a step up and benefited more beings?

Ruan Yu was too young to take care of himself, too young to leave home, and too young to be interested in the vision of the leading scholars in the field of spiritual healing, so he decisively declined the offer. Ruan Yu was used to Gu Xiuhan’s behavior and was originally reluctant, but when he saw how keen he was to send the fish to school, he nodded his tail wanly and agreed. 

Although he was invited to enter the school without examination, Ruan Yu did not want to start the school too far behind his future elite classmates in subjects other than his major, exposing the attribute of mermaid thinking half a beat slower, so he spent this time studying hard for his higher secondary school course.

Gu Xiuhan focused on the report in front of him, the light screen on the energy transmission pipeline structure diagram zoomed in several times, concentrating on checking. But a few meters away, the pearl-white water-powdered fish tail kept tugging at the corner of his eyes.

The heat slowly rose, fumigating thoughts into an ambiguous blur.

Ruan Yu wholeheartedly trusted and clung to Gu Xiuhan… on an affectionate level.

Unlike humans, who tend to be complex, the mermaid race could read each other’s brain signals, think transparently, and were pure and sincere beings who could easily place their trust in people.

If one encounters an ill-intentioned nurturer, he or she could take good care of them and patiently coax them… It would not be difficult to alienate it into a vessel for nasty wishes.

Gu Xiuhan once saw a feathered clan kept in the home of a senior military official. The humanoid intelligent creatures with wings on their backs had suffered similarly to the mermaid race, with their homes destroyed and few survivors, and they had an IQ and brain capacity similar to that of Homo sapiens.

It was a lush looking male feathered creature, his wings white as snow, floating with a hazy glow, his light body made for flying adorned with a lot of vulgar and heavy jewels and gold stones, he was obedient to the high ranking military officer who raised him, his beautiful face was full of joy and satisfaction.

In fact, he was free.

A series of additions to the rights of intelligent beings introduced by the Council many years ago ensured that these existing sparsely populated interstellar stragglers enjoyed all the rights of an Imperial citizen.

The feathered one could certainly leave. But the real cage was cognitive and emotional. Because of the illusion of loving and being loved, he was willing to draw a prison and become a pet to be desecrated. His world shrunk so much that he was left with a gigantic cage of gold and jade.

Unknowingly, Gu Xiuhan’s point of view shifted from the light screen to Ruan Yu again. The mermaid, who was entering maturity, openly revealed his body to the trusted person, and behind the thin and tough waistline was a full and bulging arc, with a rich line of fishtail, shallowly plunged into the thick and soft blanket, and the scales reflected the pearl-like gorgeous light colors.

Such beautiful ignorance, indeed easy to evoke the dark places of human greed and evil thoughts.

Not knowing what came to mind, Gu Xiuhan suddenly withdrew his eyes. An unbalanced heartbeat sounding in his eardrums.

The next second, Gu Xiuhan withdrew his sight, Ruan Yu thought he was stealthily peeking over the top of the page, focusing all the energy of his mental net on Gu Xiuhan and secretly observing his mental body.

Just a moment ago, Gu Xiuhan’s pale golden mental body abruptly turned into a blazing white symbolizing agitation or mania. A few meters away, Gu Xiuhan stood in front of the light screen, his body was as straight as a mountain, and his eyes were staring straight at the schematic diagram of the energy transmission pipeline structure on the light screen.

Ruan Yu glanced again at Gu Xiuhan’s blazing white mental body to make sure he was not mistaken. Then, he glanced at the light screen in front of Gu Xiuhan again.

Gu Xiuhan did not seem to notice Ruan Yu’s observation, his expression was incomparably concentrated, sometimes zooming in and out, 3D rotating the energy transmission pipeline on the light screen, sometimes gazing in contemplation, as if he could not see enough of this pipeline.

“…” Ruan Yu looked confused, not daring to make a sound, and slowly retracted behind the pages of the book.