Chapter 1041: There Are Sea Creatures in the Sea (6)

Though it was raining a little, the road to go see the sea was enjoyable from the journey itself.

The carriage had no fewer than two human air conditioners aboard, both of them pouring out Cold Aura chill, so it was a whole separate world, completely divorced from the sticky heat of summer.

One ought to hear Peng Daesan’s opinion too, seeing as he was the one driving the carriage through the rain, but still.

The place the group was headed was southeast of Shanghai, in the part that jutted outward.

The people of this region called it Pudong.

Since it was the area east of the Huangpu River, they called it Pudong, and when Qing said she wanted to go see a wide-open view of the sea, it was also the place the inn server had recommended.

You might ask what an inn server would know.

But an inn server in the Central Plains was not just some ordinary employee at an inn. In the power structure of an inn, they held authority nearly equal to the chef’s, and theirs was a professional trade that doubled as the source of all rumors and the local guide besides.

If you went to the far end of Pudong, he had said, then to the south you could see the wide-open East Sea, and to the east there were salt fields stretching out, along with a fairly large Salt Town.

A Salt Town meant a settlement attached to salt pans, and if those salt pans were officially licensed by the state, then naturally the scale was considerable enough that a whole town grew up around them.

There was also the term Salt Village.

But Salt Village usually referred to a little settlement where people worked illicit salt pans without permission, and they tended to be hostile to outsiders, like those slash-and-burn hamlets.

Just as slash-and-burn village was not exactly a favorable term, Salt Village was not a very favorable one either.

Anyway.

A place where you could see the wide-open sea.

And since there were homes nearby, you could buy food there, and even get a room and spend the night if you wanted.

And so, after half a day in the carriage.

Pudong was about one hundred li away, and the secluded country roads were muddy, so it was a journey that would not end until well after noon. Since that was how it was, they decided to deal with lunch first on the way.

They stretched a long ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) awning out beside the carriage, lit a fire, and took a short break for an impromptu camp.

Lunch was Seomun Cheong’s special hodgepodge porridge!

At first glance, it looked like she was just taking whatever ingredients she had and throwing them in at random to boil.

But in truth?

It was true that she was throwing things in and boiling them, but she was not boiling them at random.

The ingredients that gave off flavor as they simmered went in first, while the ingredients whose texture needed preserving went in later. And among what she had, anything with an overly distinct aroma, or anything likely to ruin the overall balance, did not go in at all.

She even half-stir-fried vegetables like scallions and onions first, then poured in water to make a vegetable stock, then added another portion midway through, and finally added what remained at the end, splitting them into three states: fully cooked, properly cooked, and barely blanched.

Qing, however, had never learned how to cook.

It was just some nameless mixed-up porridge she cooked by relying on remembered flavors and aromas, plus whatever inspiration struck her as probably delicious if boiled together.

In other words, this taste was pure raw talent!

If she had gone into cooking instead of martial arts, she would have made a name for herself throughout the world. And if she had loosely copied dishes from her homeland, she might have gone down in history as a great chef who expanded the very outer boundaries of Central Plains cuisine.

The greatest chef of the Central Plains is me. Or no, Master Chef Seomun Cheong. Or The Chinese Restaurant in Another World. Or Let Me Tell You How I Opened a Western Restaurant in Ancient China. And so on.

She might not have become famed as the greatest beauty under heaven, but as the single finest flavor under heaven.

Really, even before she ever set foot in Murim, she had been the kind of talent who should have learned cooking instead of going to some strange, nameless provincial university for no good reason!

But it was not easy for a person to realize her own talents, and for one ordinary teenager before all that, it would hardly have been easy to look at the fact that she made an unbelievably good bowl of instant noodles and conclude that she ought to dedicate herself to the culinary world.

Sadly.

Anyway.

This time too, Qing’s hodgepodge porridge received enormous acclaim.

And in truth, that in itself was a major achievement.

Because Peng Daesan was the young master of one of the most distinguished great houses in the Central Plains, and Gongsun Yoye too, though her house was somewhat less among the very most distinguished, was still the precious daughter of a very fine family.

Of course, Seol Iri was the exception.

When it came to porridge, Seol Iri was a porridge fanatic who lost all objectivity because porridge came with massive bonus points from the start, the sort who would go huff-huff and shovel it down even if all you cooked was plain rice porridge.

Anyway, the fact that it had been excellent even by the standards of those two meant that Seomun Cheong’s special hodgepodge porridge really was remarkably fine.

You could tell the satisfaction was no ordinary thing just by looking at Jayeo, with her belly sticking out round and plump like a tadpole’s.

After eating, they gathered under the awning, watched the rainy landscape, and took a short breather.

Before them lay a gray, colorless, dim expanse of reeds beneath a darkened sky.

There was no great wind, but with the falling raindrops, the reed field shivered in little twitching tremors, and the field formed by all those trembling reeds looked as though it stretched without end all the way to the horizon.

Though on land, waves were breaking.

Quiet waves made by the lush green blades of summer reeds.

All around them was nothing but the sound of rain falling,

the sound of raindrops striking the awning.

For some reason, the sight and sound of rain, seen and heard from beneath a roof where it could not touch you, brought with it a strange sense of relief and peace.

They sipped tea brewed from collected rainwater.

And so they enjoyed this little rainy camp amid the falling rain and the scenery around it.

No one in the party opened their mouth, but still, with the shared feeling of this is nice, it was a peaceful moment beyond words....

Jayeo, tucked neatly in Qing’s arms, had at some point gone limp, dozing off with little nods.

At that, Qing snickered and looked at San.

“So, San, want to go rest inside for a bit? I can drive the rest.”

Now that he had finally come along with them for once, it felt awkward and sorry to leave him doing nothing but driving the carriage the whole time.

Driving a carriage was something Qing had done before, and it was only raining, not as if they were passing through any particularly difficult terrain. Besides, it felt like they would reach the shore in about half a shichen anyway.

“No. It’s fine.”

Peng Daesan shook his head.

Really, even if he handed the carriage over to Qing and went inside, how much more comfortable would it be?

Peng Daesan, Seol Iri, and Gongsun Yoye were all Qing’s friends, yes, but if you took Qing out of the middle, the rest were all awkward with one another to an almost painful degree.

Why, it was that friend-of-a-friend feeling. When the mutual friend was there, everyone got along and chatted just fine, but the moment the central friend dropped out, the friends-of-a-friend all became awkward with one another.

“Still, isn’t it boring? Hm. Well, can’t be helped. It’s raining, but the weather’s warm. All right, let’s go!”

Qing shouted that as she settled into the seat beside the driver.

“You could just go inside.”

“Nah. Since it’s raining and all, it feels a little stuffy in there too.”

More than anything, during a trip, was not filling the passenger seat at least basic courtesy toward the driver?

Jayeo was dozing off anyway, and everyone had eaten their fill, so they could rest inside for a bit.

And so, the carriage set off once more.

To the right of the road stretched a dark wasteland dotted here and there with low shrubs.

To the left, beneath a hillside with a fair drop, spread a wide gray reed field.

Pudong was not land fit for farming because the earth was too salty, and neither was it the sort of place tourists flocked to, so in the wide-open scenery to either side, there was not a single human figure to be found.

The feeling of crossing through a darkened world under the rain, with nothing but the sound of rain filling the sky.

“...This is better than I expected.”

“Hm? What is?”

“Going out for pleasure on a rainy day. It is not as bad as I thought. No—rather, it is unexpectedly nice. Calm.”

“That’s because we’re not the ones getting rained on? Snow and rain are always lovely as long as they’re not hitting me.”

“Hm.”

“Speaking of snow, come to think of it, have you ever shoveled snow, San? Since you’re the young master of some distinguished house, I guess you’d never have had to. Ha, seriously, I can still remember getting up at dawn to shovel snow.”

“What do you mean, memories of shoveling snow?”

“Well, if you live in the mountains, snow piling up is work in itself. What are you going to do if it freezes after that? Not eat? So if it starts snowing, you have to shovel it first.”

“Were you not of at least elder rank? And yet you shoveled snow?”

“The young should shovel it. And actually, I’m not talking about the Priestess Order.”

It was not the Priestess Order she meant, but the time she had served out military labor in her homeland.

And so Qing kept chatting away beside him.

Because the duty of the companion in the passenger seat was to keep talking so there was no empty silence.

Of course, that did not mean what she was saying had any particular substance, so the carriage driver Peng Daesan merely gave answers like hm, mm, I see, is that so, listening with one ear and letting it out the other.

And yet, behind the face veil hanging from his hat, an unconscious smile had come to rest at the corners of his mouth.

Sadly, he himself did not know it.

How much time passed like that?

At some point, the view suddenly opened wide beyond the road.

Apparently the scenery that had been hidden before had revealed itself as the road ahead turned downhill.

Completely unlike the horizon of the reed field, a faint line where water met sky spread before them, the horizon’s peculiar pale and precarious boundary.

At last, the sea!

And Qing’s eyes began to shine too.

Qing had always carried within her, from the people of her homeland, a certain dreamlike ideal when it came to the sea.

Bright sunny weather was impossible from the beginning, so setting that aside, she still imagined jewel-bright water shimmering in clear blue light, and fine white sand spread in a spotless beach....

Of course, in Qing’s homeland, a sea like that hardly existed in reality.

And there was one truly cruel truth besides.

Even if you went overseas, it was the same there too!

Those picture-perfect seas shimmering in emerald hues were, in fact, the result of countless layers of correction and filtering.

When you saw the sea with your own eyes in real life, it did not come out that brilliantly blue and green and jewel-like.

For colors like that to appear, you needed one of only a few days in the whole year when weather and humidity aligned, and even among those, you still needed a specific time of day.

But so what. A person was allowed to hope a little.

Still, hope was free.

And because you hoped, you were disappointed.

“Mm. It’s the sea. It’s definitely the sea, but.”

Really, the scenery from the reed field onward should have tipped her off.

A reed field close to the shore meant a wetland thick with salt, and beyond it lay an even saltier wetland where even reeds could not live.

And another word for that salt-saturated wetland was?

Mudflats.

And so when the carriage finally descended the slope, all that spread before them was a vast expanse of mudflats.

And the seawater in the distance, pounding at the far-off shore, was blackened into muddy dark water as well.

Why, in Qing’s homeland too, did they not say that the West Sea was naturally murky and dark, basically shit water?

And the East Sea of the Central Plains was exactly what her homeland called the West Sea, so in truth, this was the same sea Qing had occasionally seen back home.

“What is there to be so disappointed about? It is rather a scenic view in its own way. In fact, because it is raining, it is even lovelier. I feel we did well to come.”

As Peng Daesan said, this seaside mudflat on a dark rainy day had, in a way, a heavy sort of melancholy beauty pouring from it.

“But it’s all mud. Then getting into the water is a pain too. And if it rains, the mudflats get even sloppier. Also, is the tide coming in right now, or going out?”

At that, Peng Daesan’s expression twisted sharply.

“What are you talking about? Getting into the water?”

Deep vertical lines carved themselves between his brows into the clear shape of the character for river, his eyes took on the look of someone staring at something profoundly bizarre, and the corners of his mouth bent downward as he looked at Qing.

If one were to put it plainly, it was the expression of someone thinking, What kind of bullshit is this now?

Unfortunately, Peng Daesan kept his face covered with that peerless beauty, that most handsome face in all ages, so Qing could not actually see the expression.

So Qing answered in perfect ease.

“Hm? Well, obviously. We came to the sea.”

“No, I do not understand. Which part of that is obvious?”

“What, we came to the sea, and you’re saying we only look at it with our eyes?”

“If not only with our eyes?”

“You go in.”

At that, Peng Daesan’s expression crumpled again.

It was the face of someone hearing, for the first time in his life, a piece of absurdity beyond all former experience.

“What are you saying? Go in where?”

“The sea?”

“Why?”

“Because we came to the sea?”

“So.”

And then, before long, Peng Daesan let out a deep sigh.

At that, Qing clicked her tongue and said—

“Well, honestly, I didn’t expect much from you anyway. Always so strict and solemn and serious, all ‘hm, mm, listen to my deep voice.’ Going into the water, yeah, right, of course not. San, you live in the carriage. I’m going into the sea.”

“No, I genuinely do not understand in the slightest. Why? The idea of going into the sea—for no special reason, just because one came to the sea—I have never in my life heard such a thing.”

Well, that was because among the people of the Central Plains in this era, there simply was no culture of splashing around and playing at the seaside.

In the first place, would anyone in the Central Plains, where the Maritime Prohibition Decree did not even allow people to live near the sea, go all the way to the coast just to play there?

In this age, the seashore in the Central Plains was not a resort. It was simply the edge of the continent.

And with Japanese pirates thrown in for good measure.

So the sea was a dangerous place, and in many ways a taboo place too.

Which meant, quite simply, that the very concept of sea bathing did not exist!

Of course, Qing had no way of knowing that.

“If you don’t want to, then don’t. No need to act like you’ve heard the secrets of the cosmos for the first time. Ah, this looks like a good place to stop. Hey! It’s the sea! Let’s play!”

And naturally, to the rest of the party too, this was absolutely brand-new information they had never heard before in their lives.

“Into the sea...? Wouldn’t that be dangerous? Dangerous?”

“No.”

“Huh.”

At that, Qing was the one who momentarily lost for words.

What was this? They had finally come all the way to see the sea, so why was no one showing any enthusiasm at all?

Ah, were they maybe the sort who hated getting their clothes wet?

Or was it because of the rain?

But it was not raining that hard, and if anything it was better because it was less hot, was it not? It was not even windy.

Still, people like this, who started out trying to be all composed and dignified, always rediscovered their inner child the moment they fell into the water once.

“All right, then. Jayeo, combine!”

“Combine!”

The instant Qing cried out and threw her arms wide, Jayeo echoed her in a child’s pronunciation and leaped into Qing’s arms.

She wrapped both arms tight around Qing’s neck and clamped her short little legs around Qing’s waist.

Thus was attained the realm of combination!

And Qing kicked off from where she stood.

Charging out without warning, Qing looped one arm around Seol Iri’s waist and tucked her under her right side, then caught up with Gongsun Yoye’s timid backward retreat and tucked her under her left side too.

And then, right, charge! To the sea!

“W-wait just a moment, Miss Seomun, I can go on my own feet—!”

That was Gongsun Yoye’s thoroughly flustered voice.

At the same time, even while half-panicked, Seol Iri reacted with remarkable speed, kicking off her shoes in a hurry as she thrashed her feet.

But Qing was a true master.

For these lesser experts to stop the actions of a true master was utterly impossible.

SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT.

This was the sound of Qing’s bare feet stamping across the soaked mudflats.

Mudflats lay somewhere between land and water, which meant this counted as both Overland Lightness and Water-Skimming Lightness, so if one insisted on naming it, perhaps it could be called Mudflat-Skimming Lightness.

And so in an instant, one person and the three attached to her—four people total—shot across the vast mudflats—

BANG!

Qing’s stamping step thunderously struck the tidal mud, and mud burst in all directions in the shape of a great crown.

Qing and her attached parties soared high, tracing a graceful arc through the air, and then—

SPLASH!