Chapter 38 – Recovery (First part) TL: Milaryn Edit: IlkonEbi

TL note: Bold text is in Japanese.

A clean, floral, elegant hospital ward.

When Jiaming moved his body, he felt like he was a dumpling. Of course, on another bed in this room, there was another outstandingly wrapped dumpling. If she were to try and get off the bed, she did not need to wear any clothing at all.

Of course, it was just a metaphor. Jiaming thought, ‘If that old man had beaten the girl’s legs due to that reason, then he was a big pervert.’

“Jiaming, come take a bite. I bought canned tangerines today. Open your mouth, ah—”

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“Oh but… they said that pigments are added to canned foods…”

“Just eat them! Don’t be picky!”

“Mmmm…” —a tangerine slice was forced into his mouth— “Shasha your mask changes really quick, did you learn from those Sichuan face-changing performers[1]?”

“If you say more, I’mma hit you.” Shasha jokingly raised her hand, while the timid Jiaming surrendered and focused on eating the tangerines.

After a pause, Jiaming asked again, “Oh yeah, Shasha. Why are you here so early today? Were there no classes?”

“There’s a recitation competition at school today. Did you forget?” Shasha smiled as she passed over another half a can of tangerines. Jiaming declined with a wave of his hand, indicating he was full, “Lingjing joined it as well; you didn’t go see her perform?”

“Of course I saw her first, than skipped class.” Shasha grinned, “Besides, Lingjing’s gonna win first place anyways. She’ll probably drop by with the award after. Since you don’t want the tangerines, should I give them to her to eat?” She pointed at the sleeping girl next to them.

“Yeah, sure.”

The patient in the other sick bed was also someone that had survived this incident, so these past two days, Shasha had some sort of interaction with her. However, it was the first time she initiated contact first. Tsukichi Kaoru propped herself up when she felt someone was coming near her bed. White bandages were wrapped around her whole body from her neck downwards, but she had proven to be extremely resilient. After all, she had been able to kill someone even before receiving treatment, so currently she had no problems moving around. She made a limited, but extremely graceful bow at Shasha.

“Um… Hi… This… For you.” Faced with such grace and courtesy, Shasha fumbled slightly as she passed the open can of tangerines with the spoon in it to her, then hurried to bow at her in response.

Tsukichi Kaoru glanced down at the half-filled can, then looked past Shasha towards Jiaming in the other sick bed. However, Jiaming was looking out the window and enjoying the scenery outside without any indication of paying attention to them. She only briefly hesitated before raising her bandaged hands to pull the can closer to herself and said, “Arigatou.”

“Ah, arigatou, arigatou…” Shasha repeated what she said without the faintest idea of what it meant. She ran back to Jiaming’s side, “Jiaming, what does ‘arigatou’ mean?”

“It means ‘thank you’.” Jiaming rolled his eyes at her.

“Oh right! ‘Arigatou’ is thank you, ‘sayonara’ is goodbye. I completely forgot.” Shasha stuck her tongue out at him, “I wasn’t responding to her correctly at all huh?”

“That’s just stating the obvious. However… why are you so afraid of her?” Jiaming looked at her doubtfully.

“I’m not scared, but I’m in awe of her. When that bastard Cao Dongfeng was beating you so much, I felt that it must have hurt so much that I wouldn’t be able to stand it, but she got tortured by that perverted old man for three days! Also, look, she’s eating in such a refined way.” Shasha nibbled on her bottom lip as she pulled on Jiaming to look at the girl eat. This Tsukichi Kaoru seemed to exude the aura of an ancient chinese lady when she delicately took in small mouthfuls of the tangerine. Shasha could not help but comment, “Even more impressive than Lingjing…”

“That doesn’t really seem like a person though, right?” Since Shasha liked to debate about things, Jiaming would be impish and deliberately point out all the flaws. “I mean, take a look at her, she can only open her mouth to a certain size, what if she wanted to eat a steamed bun? It’s difficult to imagine, right? Since she’s insistent on not showing her teeth when she smiles or when she eats, and instead keeps such an unnatural expression, it must be because all her teeth have rotted away. They are probably really yellow and it’s possible some of them have turned black! Also, it seems like she’s testing for poison when she’s eating. It really doesn’t give off an ounce of sincerity…”

As Jiaming was blabbering away, the currently eating Kaoru puzzledly looked over towards them, then she politely bobbed her head at them. Jiaming and Shasha, who had flushed from holding back her choked laughter, hurried to bow in response.

“Go die, saying that about someone.” Slapping Jiaming on the uninjured shoulder, Shasha lay face-down on top of the blanket, trying to suppress her laughter. At that moment, Lingjing came into the room still carrying her schoolbagt and instantly complained, “Shasha, you didn’t wait for me!”

Shasha rolled over on the bed to face Lingjing and asked, “So how was it? Did you win a prize?”

“Yep.” Lingjing nodded carelessly, then took out a certificate and a notebook from behind her. “First place! And I also got this notebook.”

“Yay! The notebook belongs to me!” Lingjing won a lot of awards ever since she was young. However, once they had become a group of three, all the prizes would be given to Shasha, as she had never won anything ever since she was young, due to her naughty temperament. Writing into the notebook, she felt that something was slightly off, so she nudged Jiaming, “Lingjing is very beautiful today, isn’t she?”

At that time, when students performed, the beautiful girls all had a certain way of dressing up. Lingjing was no different — she had rouge and lipstick on and was wearing a pristine white, frilly princess dress; she looked very beautiful. Unfortunately, Jiaming was used to this sight since he was young, and he did not feel that she needed to be that dressed up. He felt that she was enchanting even when wearing a simple sleeping gown, while Shasha usually liked Lingjing all dressed up. He assumed that it was because women tend to like to beautify themselves.

“Lady Lingjing, as a reward, Huaisha-bro will give you a kiss.” Shasha smirked as she jokingly pounced at Lingjing to kiss her red cheeks. Lingjing was in the middle of taking off her school bag and did not have anywhere to hide. The only thing she could do was lean away from Shasha, while smiling.

“No need… Ah—!”

“Umm… Well—!”

Bang— the two girls tumbled onto the ground, with Shasha on top of Lingjing, the former finally succeeding in kissing the latter. Truth was, the two girls slept in the same bed during the weekends so whether it was a kiss or even touching each other was something they were used to already. They would also shower together and sometimes slept together in bed while naked. Since they basically did everything but last base together, Jiaming imagined them to be a true lily couple. In any case, it was somewhat embarrassing for them to be tangled together on the hospital floor, so they hurried to pick themselves up as Jiaming watched them from his bed. He was currently feeling… some sort of admiration.

It was not like he had not seen homosexual women before in his previous life. Life in the criminal underworld was very dangerous and no one knew if they would see the sun rising the next day or not. Many people had different ways of dealing with it, some followed an extremely strict ascetic routine, while some ended up with twisted tendencies and some female assassins were extremely cold when they shared a bed. One time, he had finished a job and him and two female assassins were going to share a room. When he came out of the shower, he saw that the two ladies were sharing the bed passionately, so he just sat on the side and listened to the two of them enjoy themselves. When morning came, one of the women wondered why he did not join them, while the other thanked him and said that because they had such an incredible bodyguard by their side, last night had been particularly relaxing and satisfying.

However, in this type of situation where they were not part of the criminal underworld, as these two young ladies had been together since they were young and had a good opinion of each other, what would those feelings of love become once they grow up? Would they be together and be able to live happily ever after? Jiaming could not help but be curious as to how the two girls’ relationship would evolve.

——-

[1] Bian lian – literally face-changing – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bian_lian for your reference. ↩

2 / 4  chapters of the week (next release is Wednesday, March 14).

MCpls, the misunderstanding is getting out of hand lel.