11/13/2025, 3:09 AM
i love fen sm shes so sweet ;-;
yunxu exhaled and looked back into the water.
he had believed in the gods, for a time. then he'd started to believe he was deluding himself, and if he did now, it was only as something watching what it had created without enough care to intervene.
everything had an explanation behind it, an answer he could find if he listened to the people who cared about those things. an astronomer could tell you the tides were the doing of the moon. a naturalist could tell you why the fish were scarce in one season and plentiful in another.
he didn't like answers he couldn't understand.
but it was no longer the sore point it had been when he'd first washed up, so yunxu only nodded. fen meant well by it, he could tell- which was saying something, since he knew he had a tendency to take everything much more personally and with much more aggression than it was intended.
"grandfather was," he said. "blessed, or very dedicated. i did ask him to tell me how he did it once, but it was the sort of thing that, hm...he was very cryptic about. perhaps i would have learned in time, but...i ended up here instead."
but- and the thought felt awkward, oddly-shaped even in his head after this month, which he knew had only been about a month but felt like it had been a year or more- somehow, right now, the thought of family didn't have the same sting that it used to.
yunxu smiled. it felt genuine, this time.
"i'm not sure he'd like being yanked away from home in his old age," he said, with a laugh. "but...i hope so. and i wouldn't be opposed to learning for ourselves."
he didn't imagine his family was so well-favored as fen's. shenlei's people were chosen of the dragon for a reason, whether luck or twist of fate or indeed some god watching out for them. he was...jealous, certainly. but not resentful. fen was already kinder than he would have been in her place and...he couldn't be an asshole in the face of that. she'd still been torn away from her home, even if many of them had ended up here. less brutal than his awakening, probably, but not less disorienting.
so any objection he might have had to the teaching died on his tongue.
"well...it's hard in the same way hunting is, i suppose?" he couldn't really remember- just that he'd been doing it his entire life and by now it was second nature, a built-in instinct like baring your teeth. "they're different skills, but we're made for both."
"the main difference is, we can't swim. they'd outpace us easily, so they can't be chased like you would a rabbit, unless you're very lucky, or it's the middle of spawning season. but it's a little late in the year for that, so we just have to be patient, i'm afraid. it, ah, isn't for everyone." the impatient least of all. many children learned that the hard way- he had, once upon a time. patient had stopped being a word used to describe him a while ago, but he thought he still did a fair job when it came to fish.
"the best places to catch them are like this," a nod to the rotting tree splayed out over the water. "they like to gather beneath the branches. safety from predators. or you can find someplace shallow to stand- river rapids are good- and wait for them to come by. if they aren't showing up, you can use berries or scraps of meat as bait. food is a good motivator, even if they know there's danger." he smiled wryly. it had worked well enough on him to get him here. "or leaves, twigs- anything they might think is an insect long enough for you to strike."
...he was talking too much. yunxu laughed nervously, scraping one paw along his leg.
"dawn and dusk are the best times for fishing. i could...demonstrate first, if you like? i doubt we'll both be able to fit, but you could watch from the shore. less chance of someone falling in that way."
english | mandarin