Chapter 267: Harbour city 8.

"It likes you," Mo Yuxin said, watching with a soft expression she rarely let anyone else see.

"I think it wants to be picked up," Su Yubing said, sounding almost helpless about it, and carefully lifted the egg into her arms, cradling it the exact same way she might hold something far more fragile than stone or shell ever could be.

Mo Yuxin picked up the curved blade next, testing its weight in one hand, and felt a faint resonance hum up through her arm the moment her fingers wrapped around the hilt, the kind of response only a weapon with its own dormant spiritual awareness gave off when it approved of a potential new owner. The leather bound manual, once Su Yubing skimmed through its first few pages properly, turned out to be a complete cultivation method fitting her own ice and water leaning cultivation almost too perfectly to be simple coincidence, as though Ao Jing had somehow known exactly who would eventually come looking for it.

They did not need most of the spirit stones piled along the shelves, not really, not at their cultivation level, so Mo Yuxin gathered up several jars of them anyway and pressed them into Ruan Xue’s and Chen Hao’s hands over their half hearted protests.

"Take them," she said simply. "You will need resources like this if you want to keep growing stronger. We already have more than enough between the two of us."

"We cannot possibly accept this," Chen Hao started to say, only for Su Yubing to cut him off gently.

"Consider it payment for good company on a long voyage," she said, smiling warmly at both of them. "We do not make friends easily, given how careful we usually have to be about who gets close to us. Let us do this much, at least, for the two of you."

Ruan Xue, predictably, teared up a little at that, insisting between sniffles that she was definitely not crying, she just had something in her eye from all the dust in the vault, while Chen Hao pretended very hard not to notice how choked up his junior sister had actually gotten over a handful of spirit stones and a bit of unexpected kindness.

...............

By the time they made it back up to the surface and rowed the small boat back toward the waiting Tide Dragon, the sun had already started sinking toward the horizon, painting the whole sky in deep orange and violet. The egg, tucked carefully inside a cushioned pouch at Su Yubing’s hip, gave a small trembling shudder partway through the return trip, a thin crack spreading briefly across its shell before sealing itself back shut, like whatever was inside had simply rolled over in its sleep rather than actually waking up just yet.

"Not yet," Su Yubing murmured to it softly, patting the pouch gently. "Rest a little longer. We still have a long way to go before you need to worry about any of this."

That night, once the excitement of the day’s discoveries had finally settled and most of the ship had gone quiet, Mo Yuxin and Su Yubing found themselves up on the highest open deck instead of retreating straight to their cabin, sitting close together with a shared blanket around their shoulders and the newly acquired egg resting safely between them in its pouch, watching the stars scattered impossibly thick across the clear night sky.

"Do you ever think about it," Su Yubing asked quietly, leaning her head against Mo Yuxin’s shoulder. "How strange it is, that after everything, we ended up here. Married. Sailing toward a continent neither of us has ever seen, with a baby sea dragon we found sealed in an ancient vault."

"I think about it every day," Mo Yuxin said honestly, wrapping an arm around her. "Mostly I think about how lucky I got, that you actually said yes to me back then."

"You did chase me for two years," Su Yubing reminded her, smiling against her shoulder.

"Best two years I ever spent in my whole life," Mo Yuxin said. "I would do it again in a heartbeat if I had to, even knowing how stubborn you were about it at first."

Su Yubing turned her head up at that, and Mo Yuxin met her halfway, the kiss slow and unhurried in a way that had nothing to do with urgency and everything to do with just wanting to be close to each other, the blanket slipping a little off their shoulders as Mo Yuxin’s hand came up to cradle the back of Su Yubing’s head, deepening it gently. When they finally broke apart, foreheads resting together, Su Yubing let out a soft, contented breath.

"We should go back to the cabin," she said quietly, a faint teasing edge creeping back into her voice. "Before Ruan Xue comes looking for us again and finds something she was not supposed to see this time."

Mo Yuxin laughed, low and warm, and stood, offering a hand to pull her up carefully so as not to jostle the egg. "After you, wife."

Whatever quiet hours followed after they finally closed their cabin door behind them that night belonged only to the two of them, the same way it always did, private and warm and entirely their own business, while the egg slept undisturbed in its own small padded basket on the table nearby and the ship carried on steadily through calm dark water toward whatever waited for them further south.

...............

The weeks that followed passed in a comfortable rhythm, the kind that made the vast ocean start to feel almost familiar instead of endless and frightening. Ruan Xue’s admiration for the two of them only grew, to the point where she started keeping a small journal of everything she learned just from watching them train together in the mornings, insisting it would help her own cultivation someday even though Chen Hao teased her mercilessly about it being more of a diary about her favorite senior sister and senior sister in law than an actual cultivation log.

.

.

.

.

TO BE CONTINUED,