Chapter 46: You Two Have Something Going On
“It is interesting! Very interesting!” Ye Ran became excited.
Chi Yuheng looked up at him. A certain someoneâs mouth hit the emergency brakes. “Uh… I mean, how can you know if it’s interesting without going to see? For the sake of your careers, I can reluctantly go with you to take a look.”
Nothing changed faster than Ye Ranâs face and words.
Chi Yuheng raised a hand to pat Ye Ranâs head. “Then we’ve truly troubled our little leaf-let.”
Ye Ran mercilessly slapped Chi Yuhengâs hand away. “I told you, no calling me by my nickname!”
…
In the afternoon, the tide receded. Chi Yuheng and the others were going to fish in the inland lake of the island. Ye Ran found it uninteresting and arranged to go “catching the sea” with Xu Huiyang and the others.
Xu Huiyang prepared a small bucket and a small shovel. Upon reaching the seaside, he took off his shoes and stepped into the sea barefoot.
Ye Ran followed slowly behind, his head lowered as his eyes scanned the ground like a minesweeper, looking for razor clam holes or something similar.
While Ye Ran was scanning for razor clam holes, Chi Youchu was scanning him.
He stared until half of Ye Ranâs body felt numb. Finally, he couldn’t help but stop. “Why do you keep staring at me? Did I grow pockmarks on my face?”
While speaking, he spotted a cat’s eye snail on the ground. He bent down to pick it up; it could be considered their first seafood harvest from catching the sea.
The cat’s eye snail was large and plump. When it was first picked up, the meat hadn’t retracted yet. The most stress-relieving thing was to squeeze the meat.
Chi Youchu looked at him playfully, his tone haunting. “Do you and my brother have something going on?”
Ye Ran squeezed hard. The cat’s eye snail meat rapidly retracted, and the water on it shot out in all directions like a showerhead, successfully splashing Chi Youchuâs face.
Chi Youchu: “…”
The seawater slid down his hair and dripped into the shallow sea.
Chi Youchuâs eyelids drooped, and he gritted his teeth. “Ye! Ran!”
Ye Ran had been purely playing just now and hadn’t heard a word of what Chi Youchu said. Hearing him call his name, he looked up with a smile. “Ah? What did you just say?”
Coincidentally, there was another cat’s eye snail near the previous one. Good things come in pairs. Ye Ran nimbly picked up the other one.
“I said, do you and my brother have someâwoah…”
Before Chi Youchu could finish, he saw Ye Ran about to squeeze again and nimbly dodged to the side to avoid being splashed by seawater again.
Ye Ran stopped his movement. “You said ‘some’ what?”
Chi Youchu: “…some big bug.”
He gave up.
Ye Ranâs hearing was sometimes gone and sometimes back; heâd better talk about it later. Who knew if another wave would come and slap him onto the beach if he continued?
Ever since Chi Youchu heard the conversation between Ye Ran and Chi Yuheng, he began to suspect that their relationship seemed a bit different from his previous understanding.
There was a faint hint of ambiguity.
Plus, his brother didn’t go anywhere else but ran to Ye Ranâs place, making him, the actual brother, feel like a fake.
He treated Ye Ran as a brother, but Ye Ran wanted to be his sister-in-law!
Chi Youchu had almost imagined the scene of Ye Ran and Chi Yuhengâs wedding. Over there, Xu Huiyang found a crab and called Ye Ran over.
Ye Ran simply took off his shoes and ran over too, prepared to capture their big sea crab for tonight.
“Is this crab big or what? I’ll claim the first-class merit for tonightâs seafood feast.” Xu Huiyang pointed at the large crab.
Ye Ran looked over. The crab was indeed large, holding its two big pincers up toward the sky, clearly in a defensive state.
Xu Huiyang was about to reach out to grab it, but Ye Ran stopped him. “You’re just going to use your hand? Aren’t you afraid itâll use its pincers?”
“Wait for me; I’ll go to the shore to get the tongs.”
Xu Huiyang glanced at the crab. “I caught crabs with my brother when we went catching the sea before. Look at how stiff it is; it clearly has slow reactions. I definitely won’t get pinched.”
As he spoke, he reached out to grab it. Snap!
When Xu Huiyang straightened his waist again, a large crab was pinched onto his finger. “I got pinched…”
Like a long reflex arc, the pain arrived, and only then did Xu Huiyang shake his hand, trying to shake off the crab. “Fuck! It hurts, hurts, hurts…”
His brother was pitiful, but Ye Ran really wanted to laugh.
He put in a huge effort to hold it in.
“Thereâs another crab here, and even an abalone!” Ye Ran was drawn over by another voice.
Qiao Yubai was crouching on the other side, poking his head to look beside a rock, for fear that the crab he was watching would run away.
“Qiao Yubai?”
Ye Ran looked over. He hadn’t expected him to come to the island as well.
Qiao Yubai waved to him. “Brother! Here, here!”
Ye Ran was afraid of getting his hand pinched, so he went to the shore to get the tongs and successfully collected that crab into the bucket.
After catching the crab, Ye Ran studied Qiao Yubai. His clothes were neat and he hadn’t changed his shoes; he looked like he had just arrived on the island.
“When did you arrive?” Ye Ran asked.
Qiao Yubai answered obediently, “Just arrived this afternoon.”
“Weren’t there no boats today?”
“Tingyun Ge said he had an appointment with a partner to come to the island, so the other party sent a boat to the pier to pick us up.”
The only person who had the final say in sending a boat was Chi Yuheng.
When he came, he could only take the boat at the scheduled time, but Chi Yuheng and his partner could dispatch boats at will. Damned capitalists.
However, Ye Ran also successfully captured an important piece of information from Qiao Yubaiâs words.
“You said Ye Tingyun brought you here?”
Was the eldest brother of the Ye family about to make a move?
Previously, only Ye Muqing had cared about Qiao Yubai, and Ye Ran had wondered why Ye Tingyun had remained idle.
It seemed he wasn’t idle, but the timing wasn’t right.
A refreshing summer, a romantic islandâit had to be said that Ye Tingyun understood how to pursue someone better than Ye Muqing.
What was Ye Muqing doing? His wife was about to run off with someone else and he didn’t even know.
“Mn.” Qiao Yubai nodded. “Muqing Ge has been busy with his things. It seems heâs revising some novel. He hasn’t come out since entering his room.”
“Tingyun Ge saw I was bored at home, so he brought me out to relax.”
Ye Ran: “…”
So it wasn’t Ye Muqingâs fault. It was Ye Ran who gave him advice on how to revise the novel, and he hadn’t expected him to truly dive headlong into it.
If Qiao Yubai really ended up with Ye Tingyun on the island, would he have to compensate Ye Muqing with another wife?
Ye Ran was a bit of a mess.
The original plot didn’t specify who Qiao Yubai ended up with.
However, whether it was Ye Muqing or Ye Tingyun, as long as Ye Ran didn’t target Qiao Yubai, they wouldn’t come after him. Even if the author wanted to write him to death, they couldn’t.
While Ye Ran was still thinking, Qiao Yubai had already run far away, calling to him from a distance, “Brother, there are more crabs here, and a big sea snail over there. Your bucket probably won’t fit them all!”
Someone “catching the sea” has their eyes light up upon hearing thereâs seafood. Ye Ran carried the bucket in one hand and the tongs in the other. “Wait for me; itâll definitely fit!”
Ye Ran was in too much of a hurry. Without paying attention, his foot was sliced by a reef rock at the seaside.
Bright red blood rapidly burst out, dripping onto the grey-brown mudflat, blooming into a small patch of startling red.
The seawater just happened to reach his feet. As soon as the salty seawater touched the wound, Ye Ran instantly drew in a sharp breath.
Right at this moment, two voices came from two different directions.
Translator’s Note:
“Catching the sea” (čśćľˇ – gÇnhÇi) is a popular activity in coastal areas where people go to the beach at low tide to collect seafood like crabs, shells, and snails.
And “You two have something going on” (ä˝ ĺĺćä¸č ż – nÇmen liÇ yÇuyÄŤtuÇ) literally means “you two have one leg.” It’s common slang for two people having an affair or a secret romantic relationship. Chi Youchu is finally catching on!
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