V2C135

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The children shook for a moment, and the unruly scowl on their faces restrained considerably, yet they all remained silent. In the end, it was Yan Shi who stepped forward first, nodding and asserting his position, “We understand. He is our newest member, and we will definitely do our best to protect his safety.”

But Sumo sneered, “I’m not going to be in a group with you lot!”

The child’s tone was full of hostility, which caused the other shark children to grimace with anger, each one of them wanting to come forward and beat him up. Ruyi sighed, “Sumo, you… What’s wrong with you?”

Sumo remained unaffected, and merely sneered, “I don’t want to be here, I want to go home.”

“Go home? You don’t have a home!” Ruyi gently and sorrowfully looked at the boy and spoke gravely, “Could it be that you want to go back to that Kongsang princess? Don’t you know? She’s about to get married, so she won’t be able to take care of you.”

Hearing these words, Sumo’s face flushed dramatically and blurted out, “Even you know that elder sister is getting married?”

“Of course, everyone in the world knows that the two clans are entering into an alliance,” Ruyi sighed, “Last night, the Red King’s people almost tried to kill you, but thanks to my timely arrival I was able to save you – to her you are already a liability. Please don’t be ungrateful and insist on getting involved.”

Sumo shuddered violently and refused to say anything.

“To those Kongsang people, keeping a shark is no different from keeping a small dog or cat, when they are happy, they pet and tease them, once they become inconvenient to keep, they immediately discard them as if they are nothing.” Ruyi looked at the quiet child and her tone gradually aggravated, “After everything that has happened, you are still dreaming?”

“Nonsense!” Sumo’s face finally twitched and he looked viciously at Ruyi, exclaiming, “She… she’s my sister! She won’t leave me behind!”

“Silly boy, stop dreaming.” In her eagerness, Ruyi pulled him by the hand, almost causing the skinny child to fall flat on his face, “Those Kongsang people, there is no way they will take a shark slave to heart. Now that she’s married off to a powerful man, she has already stopped caring about you!”

“No, you are talking nonsense!” Sumo glared back at her with malice, “I don’t believe you!”

Ruyi froze for a moment, ” Foolish boy, what would you need in order to believe me?”

“I won’t believe it until I see it with my own eyes and hear it with my own ears! Unless… unless, she tells me herself that she doesn’t want me anymore, I won’t believe it!” The skinny child stood there, clenching his fists, with his entire body shaking slightly, staring at them, and the light in his eyes appeared to erupt as he exclaimed in one sentence, “Right now, I don’t believe a word you people are saying! Not a single word of it!”

“…” Ruyi never expected the boy to be so stubborn and became speechless for a moment.

Outside the courtyard, the three elders were quietly listening to all this, with a worried glint of light passing through their eyes.

It looks like, even though they had made painstaking arrangements to snatch the child back completely from the hands of the Kongsang people, the child was too deeply intoxicated and could no longer be redeemed – even after all he went through, he still had his mind set on finding that whatever sister!

Seven thousand years later, the reincarnated Ocean Emperor, actually have no heart to fight for the Sea Kingdom, pretty ironic…

“Maybe, we should try to use magic?” Elder Jian frowned with his long white eyebrows and came up with a plan, “Using a mind washing spell to erase all of this childhood memories from the past year, so that he no longer remember that little princess of Kongsang, wouldn’t that solve the problem once and for all?”

“How can it be that simple?” Elder Quan shook his head and sighed, “This child has the bloodline of the Sea Emperor in him, how can a mere cleansing spell be effective?”

“…” The elders fell silent and stopped talking.

“The first thing we need to finish before the final showdown with the Kongsang people is this struggle for hearts and minds.” Elder Quan paused, revealing a frighteningly cold light in his eyes, and whispered, “Let the boy settle here for a while first, then slowly we will build our way up step by step – the Kongsang people’s side thinks the boy is dead anyway, and won’t be looking around for him anymore. We have plenty of time to go and reclaim his heart back gradually.”

“He’s our Ocean Emperor. We can never lose this battle!”

After being trapped there for several days, Sumo finally realized where exactly he was located.

This was indeed the backyard of a large merchant’s shop from Middle Kingdom, situated in the western market of Yecheng. This shop belonged to a great merchant surnamed Murong, one of the leading merchant families in Middle Kingdom. The Murong family has been trading goods between the Yunhuang and Middle Kingdoms for generations, and has built up a foundation lasting over a century, making him famous in Yecheng, a city of merchants and traders. Because of the long distance between Yunhuang and the Middle Kingdom, it takes several years to travel back and forth, so for the sake of business convenience, the Murong family simply bought half a street of shops in the Western Market and left their trusted men to look after them on a long-term basis – it was unknown what Ruyi had done to manage to infiltrate the place and use it as another secret stronghold of the Restoration Army.

The Murong’s shop was huge, with one courtyard connected to another, each with compartments filled with goods from the Middle Kingdom: bales of silk, boxes of tea, white jade from Hetian, sunken incense from Hainan… and countless containers of yaoi grass, worth huge sums of money.

But this most isolated courtyard was empty, except for the group of shark children.

Yet even so, the place was heavily guarded, with barbed wire covering the brick walls and even the only access gate locked with iron bars, like a cage.

Sumo sat in silence under the shed, looking around at his surroundings, aware that there was no escape, and his eyes dimmed for a moment as he cast his gaze across the grounds outside.

It was a beautiful day, and the children were practicing with various weapons by prancing and jumping in the open space.

Born in the sea and brutally rebuilt afterwards by the cruel practice of breaking the bones of their legs, the shark’s body was inherently lacking in strength, but their balance and acuity were better than those of humans on the land, making them suitable for light weapons as well as long-range combat. Right now, these children were holding either short daggers or shuriken, and a few were engaged in concealed weapons and archery practice, all intently focused and appearing as if they have been training for a long time.

Sumo watched from afar and couldn’t help but remain a little lost in thoughts.

There were really so many people in the shark clan who were striving for the so-called restoration of their country? All these children at his age, all once slaves and now all liberated by the restoration army… what kind of life had they each gone through to be gathered together in this compound?

The child pondered blankly, with a mixture of emotion in his azure eyes.

Suddenly, a gust of wind rustled overhead. Sumo looked up and out of the corner of his eye caught a glimpse of something floating down from mid-air that appeared to be a dragonfly – he didn’t notice it at first, yet the dragonfly hovered over the courtyard making strange noises.

“Sumo… Sumo!”

That voice, however, the sound seemed very familiar.

Was it his sister? The child was surprised and finally couldn’t resist taking a second look around, when he suddenly realized that it wasn’t a dragonfly hovering in the sky, but a tiny bird!

The bird, not more than two inches in size, had come from nowhere and was circling over the compound, its wings flapping, slowing down and finally hitting the wire fence upside down.

“Sumo… Sumo!”

The bird which had been caught in the barbed wire fence was still fluttering its wings slightly while emitting its call.

Such a familiar sound. That, that was…!

“Sister!” The skinny child suddenly jumped up and, forgetting even to put on his shoes, he raced barefoot out of the room and across the courtyard. The children who were training watched in amazement as Sumo suddenly came running wildly and swooped straight for the wall, surprisingly ignoring the fact that it was covered in spikes.

“Pull him down… quickly!” The children exclaimed in unison, dropping the drills at hand and swarming towards him in pursuit, “Don’t move! Stop running!”

Ning Liang ran faster than the rest and was the first to catch up, recklessly grabbing Sumo by the leg.

However, in that moment, Sumo had already jumped up defiantly, lifting his arm and grabbing the paper crane that was stuck in the barbed wire fence. In the same moment, he was seized by the pursuing Ning Liang, who grabbed his leg and pulled him back with force, crushing his entire body against the barbed wire fence. The child refused to come down, his arm hauling fast through the barbed wire, bleeding from the sharp pricks, but never letting go of his fist.

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