TuxedoTranslations

Chapter 91

Waking from the dream, Albin stared blankly at the empty bed beside him, then lowered his gaze and poked the pillow next to him.

So it was just a dream…

He murmured in disappointment.

He rolled over, hugging the pillow while recalling fragments of the dream.

Although waking up left him with a hollow feeling, thinking back on it still made him unable to stop a bright smile from forming.

Xiao Hei must still be alive somewhere! He must be tall like in the dream!

Maybe he’s even thinking of me too.

Albin got out of bed, still in his pajamas, and wrote another half page of a letter to Xiao Hei.

After tidying up in the morning, he began his day’s schedule.

He planned to go to Gerold again to investigate the Mandala family, and to ask whether there were any clues about Xiao Hei nearby.

Then he would take in the scenery around the area—this way he would have more material for his next dream. After that, in the afternoon, he would go find Ou to learn swimming.

That was the plan—but just after leaving Gerold, his schedule was abruptly disrupted by an unexpected incident.

While walking down the street, a stone suddenly flew out from an alley beside him.

Looking over, Albin was startled to see a strange sea siren lying on the ground, apparently out of water.

How is there a sea siren here?

This is bad—if anyone else finds it, it’ll be a disaster.

After yesterday’s auction, Albin clearly knew what kind of treatment sea sirens received here.

He quickly blocked the alley with his carriage, wrapped the siren’s tail in a white cloak, and moved it into the carriage.

“What’s wrong with you?” Albin asked anxiously, casting a gentle water spell over its body.

He wasn’t even sure whether a sea siren would die from being out of water too long.

The sea siren did not respond, remaining silent with a blank, dazed expression.

Just in case, Albin cast a healing spell as well, then asked the driver to take it back to the seaside from the previous night.

At the same familiar rocky shore, Albin gently released the silent sea siren back into the water and reminded it to be careful in the future.

After Albin left, the sea siren’s body liquefied like water, shedding its original form and revealing Lalimar’s gritted teeth.

Lalimar glared unwillingly in the direction Albin had left.

Damn it. Even after using his [mimicry] ability to disguise himself and approach the human saint, he still failed!

No. He didn’t believe it.

This definitely wasn’t the saint’s true nature!

Maybe because he had disguised himself as an adult, it had only made humans more wary.

Previously, the missing ones from his tribe had all been minors—this time, he would try mimicking a child instead.

…

Not long after, Albin opened the lid of a water tank at the market, preparing to buy some fresh seafood from local fishermen—only to find a young sea siren, about his own age, curled up inside.

Albin: ?

He froze.

“Do you also sell sea sirens here?”

The fisherman burst out laughing. “What are you talking about, young master? How could I possibly sell sea sirens? I wouldn’t even survive a fight with one!”

“Once, I went out to sea and encountered a siren—I even heard its song and nearly thought I’d never make it back,” he said proudly and with emotion. “Luckily, the waves carried my boat back. I survived thanks to the blessing of Lord Ocean God Ochean.”

Someone at another stall shouted, “There you go bragging again.”

The fisherman shot him a glare. “This is the protection of the Sea God! What’s wrong with saying it? Many people in this city have had similar experiences. The priests also say it was divine intervention.”

“I’m telling the truth,” the fisherman continued earnestly to Albin. “Young master, the sea is dangerous. I was lucky—I only ran into a siren and not a sea monster.”

Albin blinked in surprise. “There are sea monsters too?”

“Of course,” the fisherman said confidently. “Huge ones. With tentacles like an octopus. I heard a noble family’s ship once encountered one—the ship was torn apart, and the survivors were driven mad.”

Albin listened with great interest.

But he didn’t forget his purpose. Since the siren wasn’t caught by the fisherman, Albin decisively bought the entire tank of fish.

Then he went back to the “sea siren release point” and, now very practiced, released the siren in the tank back into the sea.

But things were far from that simple. After that, Albin found that, for some reason, wherever he went, he kept encountering lone sea sirens.

He had heard that Pearl City was a place where sea sirens could be seen—but he hadn’t expected there to be so many of them.

It had reached the point where, even when he picked up a bowl of seafood soup, he would carefully stir it with a spoon just in case he discovered yet another miniature sea siren.

He didn’t even dare go fishing by the sea anymore, afraid that the moment he cast his hook, he would pull up a sea siren in full view of everyone.

Albin fell into thought.

Could it be that he had some kind of constitution that attracted sea sirens?

He even started to suspect this was some kind of “tourist experience package.”

After nervously finishing lunch, the coachman opened the carriage door for him. Albin looked up—and, oh, there was another small sea siren inside his carriage.

Strangely enough, he wasn’t even surprised anymore.

But this one was different from the previous ones. Its body was covered in bloody wounds, uneven cuts scattered across it, several scales torn off. Its short sky-blue hair was soaked with blood flowing from its head, as if it had suffered a severe injury not long ago.

Albin immediately frowned and got into the carriage, closing the door.

The sea siren looked at him warily, baring its sharp claws.

Albin said softly, “I won’t hurt you. Can I treat your wounds?”

After receiving the siren’s silent permission, Albin sat across from it, leaning forward, and carefully cleaned the wounds with a warm water orb.

“How did you get so badly hurt…” The more he treated it, the deeper his frown became.

Could it have escaped from someone?

“Can you still speak?” Albin asked worriedly, remembering the poison sometimes given to sea siren buyers at auctions.

The siren paused, then slowly shook its head.

Albin pressed his lips together sadly. “I’ll definitely heal you.”

He had the coachman take him back to his residence on Shell Street. There, he first tried giving the young sea siren an antidote, then used healing magic on it.

Disguised as a sea siren, Lalimar watched Albin busily tending to him. He had finally succeeded in infiltrating his side—but he felt no joy at all.

Because by surviving through this method, he had instead proven that this human saint was genuinely kind.

He didn’t want to believe it. He didn’t want to believe that humans could treat monsters kindly.

Lalimar watched Albin carefully heal him.

Albin was using warm healing magic over him without any trace of caution.

“How did you get so badly hurt? Who did this? That’s awful,” Albin muttered. “If it hurts, just poke me, okay?”

Heh. Of course it was done by humans.

Lalimar looked at his own wounds with cold mockery in his eyes.

This time, his mimicry had not been randomly generated—it was his younger self’s appearance. Even the wounds were deliberately replicated based on his own past injuries.

The pain spread through his body, but it also kept his mind painfully clear.

He was a sea siren, a monster cursed by the Sea God to live only in the ocean.

From inherited memory, they learned their origins. Living deep underwater, rarely seeing humans, they naturally developed intense curiosity about those same beings on land.

Almost every young sea siren longed for humans.

They would surface, observe passing ships, and excitedly share what they saw with their companions.

Some even joyfully called out to those they regarded as “kindred.”

But that was where the problem began.

Because of the Sea God’s curse, their voices sounded normal to other sea sirens and sea creatures—but to humans, they became a kind of mental attack, causing humans to lose their minds, sometimes even turning on each other.

At the time, under the propaganda of the Sea God’s Temple, humans already viewed sea sirens as evil monsters. They treated them with hostility, even calling those who killed them heroes.

And so when the sea sirens’ “friendly calls” became death sentences for humans, that belief only grew stronger.

Of course, Lalimar understood that from a human’s perspective, hostility toward sea sirens was not entirely unreasonable.

But the low-level sea sirens—whose intelligence was no more than that of six- or seven-year-old children—could not understand any of this. Even after being harmed, newborn sirens still felt curiosity and goodwill toward humans, and many died because of it.

Humans were their “kindred” in inherited memory—an idea imprinted into them before they were even born.

Even he and his sister had once been like that.

He had once looked forward to humans with admiration, surfacing with naive hope to greet them—only to be met with countless attacks.

He had not given up at first. He understood that humans feared their abilities. He persistently tried again and again, believing he would eventually meet a kind human.

But that innocence came at a cost—he was captured by humans.

He was hung in a human marketplace. Under the gaze of a crowd, people excitedly tore off his scales, pulled out his sharp claws, cut into his flesh. Children stabbed into his body, praised by adults who said they would become warriors of the Sea God’s Temple and heroes in the future.

He became material for the Sea God’s propaganda. Humans even wanted to dissect him like a fish to see whether he truly had a fish-like body.

He did not have immortality. He only barely escaped when an opportunity arose, using mimicry to slip away and return to the sea.

Humans!

Every blade of theirs had carved itself into his soul. Pain tore through his illusions, shattering his fantasies piece by piece, forcing him to see reality clearly—and to understand why land monsters attacked humans.

Humans were no longer their kin!

They were monsters—enemies to be hated.

As monsters, conquering and destroying humans was what they should do.

But no one in his tribe stood with him. Those fools, even after being hurt by humans, still clung to their fantasies.

They all wanted peaceful coexistence—including his sister.

His sister was the new queen of the sea sirens. She wanted to improve relations with humans.

So she tried to restrain the young sirens, and even when they accidentally confused humans with their powers, she would return the humans safely to shore.

She even sent uncontrollable sirens to regions where no ships passed, creating chaotic waters to prevent large-scale mental attacks from affecting fishermen.

And yet, to Lalimar, his sister was still far too naive.

If mutual goodwill alone could make humans friends, then why had they suffered for so many years?

Even if sea sirens changed, humans would not.

It would be better to completely destroy humans—or tear apart every ship daring to enter the sea and make them never return, forcing them to stay away from the ocean forever.

Lalimar was exhausted by his tribe’s innocence. The world he once lived in was like a beautiful but fragile bubble. Everyone else remained inside it—only pain could wake him, pierce the bubble, and reveal the true faces of humans.

He found that pain almost pleasurable. Only he was truly awake.

He firmly believed: all humans were hostile toward sea sirens. There could be no peace between them.

But then… why was this human saint so different from what he expected?

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