Chapter 2, I’ve Returned (2)

Zhao Xiaokui didn’t plan on leaving the situation with Shen Zhifei outside alone for too long. After collecting her emotions for a moment, she looked into the mirror, and wondered what to do with the now ruined makeup. Seeing how mermaids had no use for makeup, and she had left before she learned how to apply it, she decided to wipe the rest of it off using some removal wipes she had found in her bag. After wiping the last of the makeup off, she turned around and left the bathroom.

The makeup that she had previously been wearing had given Zhao Xiaokui a somewhat provocative and playful look. However, after having removed the makeup, her appearance had instead taken on a much softer and younger look. So when Shen Zhifei saw Zhao Xiaokui again she was a bit taken aback by her sudden change in appearance.

“I’m sorry, but could you repeat what you had previously said?'' asked Zhao Xiaokui, sitting back down in her chair. As she asked the question, Zhao Xiaokui tried desperately to keep a straight face on, acting in the way she believed a 23 year old would act. As Shen Zhifei watched her from across the table, a smile couldn’t help but spread across her face, as she inexplicably felt like Zhao Xiaokui resembled her young niece who would walk around while wearing her mother’s heels, pretending to be an adult, before realizing that Zhao Xiaokui’s eyes had grown a little red.

Thinking that Zhao Xiaokui had been crying over her trying to break her and Rong Zhen up, she began to worry if it was actually a good thing to break up a pair of lovers like this, or if it would be better to just let them be. After all, the engagement between her and Rong Zhen was something that had been forced upon both of them by their elders, and she was only following along with it to make them happy. In her mind, marriage was nothing more than a contract between families after all, and love wasn’t necessary for such a transaction.

Despite wavering for a brief second, Shen Zhifei could only repeat what she had said earlier, except this time, in a softer, and more apologetic tone. As Zhao Xiaokui listened, she quickly picked out the key points of the situation from the other’s explanation. Her current self appeared to currently be in a relationship with a wealthy upper class man. However, this man already had a predetermined fiancée picked out for him by his family. And now, this fiancée, Shen Zhifei, had come knocking on her door with 800,000 dollars in hand as reimbursement for having her break up with Rong Zhen.

Having gleaned the cause of the current situation, Zhao Xiaokui was stunned by the out-dated clichéd idol drama plot she found herself in. She began to wonder if this type of plot had grown popular again after having originally fallen out of fashion a while before she left. With all this new information filling her head, Zhao Xiaokui brusquely stood up, and opened her mouth,

“You can insult me if you wish, but please don’t insult my love life!” Putting on an annoyed and slightly weary face, Zhao Xiaokui continued her speech, “anyway, the relationship between Rong Zhen and me isn’t what you believe it to be. However, if our friendship does bother you that much, I’m willing to try and create some distance between us, so I implore you to control your fiancé better so he can do the same.” Finishing her speech, she pushed the cheque back towards Shen Zhifei while feeling a pain in her heart from rejecting so much money. Despite having kept a calm face the entire time, Zhao Xiaokui felt like she had just expended her entire ability to act. Shen Zhifei, stunned by Zhao Xiaokui’s actions, muttered a quick apology.

“I’m sorry I made such an accusation against you, I guess I had been too presumptuous.” Shen Zhifei had assumed that Zhao Xiaokui and Rong Zhen were in a relationship together, and she wasn’t the only one to think so. Many of the people in their circle had also started to assume there was something going on between her and Rong Zhen, as the actions of the two had left their relationship in a somewhat ambiguous state. However, judging by Zhao Xiaokui’s current reaction, Shen Zhifei rectified her original belief, realizing that even if there was something between them, it was probably the result of Rong Zhen acting like there was. Seeing Shen Zhifei’s reaction, Zhao Xiaokui quietly breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that she made the right bet.

Earlier while in the bathroom, she had come to the realization that a few years had passed in this world. So during the time that she was removing her makeup, she quickly pulled out her phone and browsed through it. Fortunately, the her from five years ago wasn’t someone who deleted chat logs, and it appeared that the her of the past five years had a similar habit. This made it easy for her to see what exactly her body had been doing during the years she had been gone. Looking through her message logs, she found a conversation between a manager, an assistant, and her at pinned at the top that made Zhao Xiaokui wonder if her body had become an artist of some sort during her absence.

While continuing to scroll, she remembered that the woman she had just been talking to in the café outside had mentioned a man by the name of Rong Zhen. Rong was quite an uncommon last name, so after a quick search, she found a chat log between her and Rong Zhen. Opening the chat log, Zhao Xiaokui expected to find a lot of sticky sweet words and sayings that one would find between a mistress and their financial backer. But instead what she had found was a more formal business-like conversation. Through reading the conversations between the two, she could see that Rong Zhen had quite obviously developed a favorable impression of her. Her messages on the other hand, seemed to place a certain distance between them, remaining polite and at some points even appearing somewhat impatient and annoyed. From this, she was able to draw one of two conclusions. The first was that Rong Zhen had been harassing her by using his family’s great wealth and influence. The second option was that her body had been messing around with the feelings of different men all while putting on an innocent demeanor. Either way, the answer she came up with for both scenarios was the same. Do not admit to anything.

Still standing, Zhao Xiaokui began to feel uneasy. Such confrontations, like the one she was in now, were foreign to her. So she instead tried to base her actions on how a green tea bitch would act, from the various TV shows she used to watch in her spare time. And by looking at Shen Zhifei’s expression and attitude, she believed that she had made the correct choice. Not giving the other a chance to interrupt her, Zhao Xiaokui once again opened her mouth to speak.

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“If there’s nothing else to discuss, then I’ll head out as I currently have something planned. Excuse me.” Finished talking, Zhao Xiaokui grabbed her bag, and quickly walked to exit. Hoping to get away in case Shen Zhifei tried to stop her, she pushed open the door and stepped outside. As the door closed behind her, she could feel the cold air of the AC controlled café behind her pull on the hems of her clothes, as the warm August air outside proceeded to assault her.

Fearing that Shen Zhifei might start chasing after her, Zhao Xiaokui quickly left the vicinity of the café. Turning a few corners on the street, she gradually came to a stop and found a place to sit by the side of the road. Sitting there, she took a deep breath in and tasted the scent of exhaust and burning asphalt in the air. The smell that most other people would find discomforting, she instead found to be nostalgic and pleasantly fragrant. As she sat there, enjoying the city, she silently thought to herself that it was good to be human again.

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Zhao Xiaokui remembered that someone had once said that the bigger a city was, the more similar it would be to another city. Having donned a pair of sunglasses to hide herself in the case she was actually a famous artist, Zhao Xiaokui could feel the truth behind those words as she looked around the unknown but familiar city landscape for a landmark of somesort. Unfortunately the only thing that stood out to her was a dog-shaped cloud in the distance. Sighing to herself, she resignedly pulled out her phone.

Scrolling to find the navigation app on her phone, Zhao Xiaokui couldn’t help but marvel at how much the technology had changed in the past five years. When she left, the 4th generation smart phones had just hit the markets, with costs so high, they left many a poor college student disappointed. The phones back then had also been big and clunky to hold. Now in her hand was an 8th generation smartphone, which was much slimmer and thinner than the 4th generation she was used to. Fortunately for her, while the physical parts of the phone had changed, the software still retained many of the familiar features, allowing Zhao Xiaokui to quickly find the map on her phone.

After fiddling with the app for a few seconds, Zhao Xiaokui finally got the navigation system to start and began to walk through the city again. While following the directions of the electronic voice coming from her phone, Zhao Xiaokui began to ponder a question that had been growing in her mind ever since she had first realized time had passed on earth as well. What was it that had inhabited her body during the five years she had been gone? Many possible answers came to her mind. One was that she had never transmigrated, and her experience as a mermaid was nothing but a dream. Another one was that she really did transmigrate, but only a part of her soul had left, with the other part having stayed in control of her body. However, she could only discard both possibilities due to what she had seen while going through her message logs back in the bathroom and the social media content she was currently scrolling through. The messages and content she saw led her to only one conclusion, that the one in her body during the past five years, that someone had possessed and controlled her body.

Coming to this realization, Zhao Xiaokui began to feel uneasy as a solemn expression slowly spread across her face. Zhao Xiaokui believed that no one understood her better than herself. During her time as a mermaid, she had desperately analyzed and reanalyzed every moment she could remember from earth, dissecting them repeatedly over and over again, all in order to remind herself of who she was. She could change her sneakers to high heels and her jeans to a long skirt, she could even have become someone who’s first thought in the morning was what makeup to wear that day. But she didn’t believe that she could ever have become the person she saw from her social media and chat history. The person she saw there was a master of deception, one who would put on an innocent appearance and ensnare multiple men at once. One who could juggle and play the emotions of others asif it was as easy as breathing. Zhao Xiaokui simply didn’t believe that she was smart enough to pull off such elaborate tricks, whether it was the her form five years ago or now. However, just that alone wasn’t reason enough to believe that someone had replaced her. After all, five years was more than enough time for a person to change.

Coming to a stop again for a moment, she closed her eyes to reach back into her buried memories. Reopening her eyes, she looked down at her phone, and quickly downloaded an old messaging app she had frequently used before her transmigration. Opening the newly downloaded app, she typed in her old user name and password, and was greeted by a familiar interface, and the familiar sunflower profile picture that she had painted when she was younger. Looking through her profile, Zhao Xiaokui noticed that the last post on it was from five years ago, the day she left. She also found some old messages full of nostalgic banter and chatter that she would have between her and her friends. This struck the final nail in her theory. After she blacked out from drinking five years ago, and her soul had left her body, some ghost or specter had found her body and decided to call it home.

If it had been the previous Zhao Xiaokui from the past, she might have screamed or even fainted from the shock. However, the current Zhao Xiaokui was someone who had spent five years in another world, and while the mermen were a cruel and vicious race, they also carried with them a rich history and complex knowledge about the world around them. Because Zhao Xiaokui was weak and unable to fight, she could only spend most of her time studying the knowledge the mermen had gathered over the centuries. Among this knowledge was information about spiritual creatures. So she knew that it would be okay for her to head home first before checking her body and taking any potential preventative measures, and if there was any spiritual damage to her body, she believed she knew enough on how to treat it. As for the specter itself, Zhao Xiaokui wasn’t too worried about it. Because although she had originally been human, her soul had inhabited the body of a mermaid. Such a situation had forced her soul to grow in similarity to that of a mermaid, a creature whose quality of soul could only be rivaled by a few.

As she continued to walk along the path set by her GPS, she noticed that many people in the sight had souls that, while similar, didn’t match their physical appearance, causing an overlapping effect in her vision. When she saw this, all she could do was marvel at how far plastic surgery had advanced over the years.

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