Chapter 3 – Courtship

Part – 2

… After Qin Ruoshui’s courtship tide passed, the weak human didn’t have enough stamina and fell asleep.

After everything was over, Qin Ruoshui behaved very ruthlessly, he cleaned himself and left the room.

This was the first time he had spent the courtship period with another person. It was completely different from the feeling of being patient alone in the past. Now his body full of strength.

So the other small creatures on the bottom of the sea had to suffer. The mermaid swam through the ocean, once a rock was touched by his tail it would instantly crack into tiny pieces and make a huge noise. The fish near him fled, fearing that the owner of the ocean would be unhappy with their presence.

Qin Ruoshui swam from the center of this ocean all the way to the south coast. When he was almost at the shore, he turned back and swam northward. While swimming, he hummed and so the song of a mermaid resounded throughout the ocean.

A giant whale looked up, a beautiful shell jellyfish opened its tentacles to swim in the ocean, a group of small fish among a red coral reef happily swam around, completely forgetting the fear they felt just now and thin and soft seaweed followed the rhythm of Qin Ruoshui’s song and moved it’s body.

…

When Zhuang Yan woke up again, his ears were filled with the sound of water. His body still seemed to be soaked in the sea water, but he could breathe.

Thinking of this, Zhuang Yan felt very strange. He raised his hand and placed it under his nose. He couldn’t feel any airflow. He wasn’t able to breathe in the water, but he didn’t need to breathe.

His upper and lower eyelids were like glued together, and it took him a lot of effort to open them, but there was no light, nothing but darkness surrounded him. There was no difference between opening his eyes and closing his eyes.

Compared to just now, Zhuang Yan’s mind was finally more awake. He stretched out his limbs and he felt that he was alive. There was an undefinable happiness in his heart.

Immediately after that, Zhuang Yan recalled what happened just now. He wanted to think of it as a dream, but his physical discomfort reminded him that it might have really happened.

What exactly was going on.

“Anyone?”, Zhuang Yan called out, but no one responded.

He sat up from the hard bed and then realized that the injury on his body seemed to have healed. Except for the subtle soreness, his whole body seemed to be rebuilt.

The clothes on his body had long been gone but it didn’t feel cold even when being immersed in the icy sea water. His feet were on the cold, marble-like ground. Zhuang Yan felt like a blind man as he tried to find his way but he found nothing.

He stood in front of the door and didn’t dare to go out for a while, fearing that he would annoy the owner here. Finally Zhuang Yan returned to the jade bed and began to think about his unlucky life.

In the endless darkness, time passed unusually slowly. He thought that two or three days had passed, but in fact only less than two hours had passed.

When Qin Ruoshui returned to the palace, Zhuang Yan was bored enough to squat on the ground and knock on the shells. A dull sound rang in the room, two long and three short, and it created a brisk rhythm.

The human heard the sound of the opening door and got up from the ground. His body was slanted by the current. In addition, the surroundings were dark. He could only stretch out his two arms to explore the path in front of him, so he walked carefully in the direction of Qin Ruoshui. It looked very awkward.

Qin Ruoshui hesitated for a moment but finally stopped at the same place without swimming forward.

Zhuang Yan stumbled in front of Qin Ruoshui. He opened his mouth and called out twice, but Qin Ruoshui didn’t answer.

The human reached out carefully, moved forward a little bit, and finally touched Qin Ruoshui’s chest. His fingers paused, and then they quickly retracted like they met a monster who ate humans.

Qin Ruoshui tilted his head and looked at the various reactions of this man.

Zhuang Yan shouted again, and no one answered him. He boldly stretched out his hand again. At this moment, he touched Qin Ruoshui’s face.

Zhuang Yan’s eyes brightened, not because he was surprised by Qin Ruoshui’s appearance. After all, he could not know what the other person looked like in this way, but at least he knew that the other person was his own kind.

The person in front of him hadn’t moved at all and Zhuang Yan couldn’t help but whisper in his heart: ‘Is the person in front of me really a person?’ He lowered his hand and paused on Qin Ruoshui’s chest for a moment, as if sensing his heartbeat.

Qin Ruoshui’s narrowed his eyes slightly and then suddenly grabbed Zhuang Yan’s right hand. Zhuang Yan was startled, and his left hand was about to punch the other, but then he remembered that the person in front of him might be his life-saving benefactor. So he took back his fist.

Qin Ruoshui took Zhuang Yan’s wicked hand down from his chest. Zhuang Yan was wondering what this man was doing, but then his palm touched a cold scale. Qin Ruoshui loosened the hold on Zhuang Yan’s wrist and Zhuang Yan continued groping his lower half dumbly, until a long time later, he suddenly realized that he had touched a huge fishtail.

Zhuang Yan was dumbfounded and froze.

Why was there such a big fish tail, and how was it connected with the upper body of the person in front of him?

Zhuang Yan’s eyes gradually outlined this man’s appearance.

Mermaid?

Was he still in the sea right now?

What was this, a fantasy story?

Was he really alive?

Question after question jumped into Zhuang Yan’s mind,  and even the cold water surrounding him could not calm Zhuang Yan’s surging thoughts.

Qin Ruoshui crossed Zhuang Yan and swam into the room. He stopped in front of the jade bed, frowned and brushed his palm over the bed. Suddenly the water flowed into countless small vortices and all the stains on it were cleaned up.

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