Chapter 1099: I Like You and Everybody
The message arrived at the construction camp before breakfast, moving through the barracks faster than any official courier could manage. King Roland had granted family visits — one full day, for any laborer with more than three months of service. Their families would travel by rail from Neverwinter to the terminus at the Misty Forest and meet them there.
The workers had just finished night shift. They heard the announcement and stood in the grey morning light and cheered themselves hoarse.
Snaketooth had stared at the list for a very long time.
He had found Paper’s name near the bottom. He had stared at it. The foreman had pressed him twice for an answer and he had not responded to either. He could feel the man’s impatience the way you feel weather — a pressure with direction — but he could not make his hand move. He could not make his eyes leave the two characters that spelled out her name in the camp’s administrative register.
She agreed to come.
That was what it meant. The Administrative Office contacted listed family members to confirm. If she hadn’t agreed, her name wouldn’t be here. She had seen his name — Snaketooth, from Longsong District, construction crew — and she had said yes.
“Are you approving this or not?” the foreman had snapped.
Snaketooth had grabbed the pen and signed so fast the characters came out crooked.
He waited a week for his turn in the transport rotation. The train carried a hundred people per run; Paper had been assigned to the first group, which meant she arrived at the forest terminus ahead of him by six days — waiting, or working, or doing whatever Paper did in the margins of the front lines. Snaketooth spent those six days reciting the speech he’d composed and discarding it and recomposing it and discarding it again.
His bunkmates had opinions about his behavior.
“Is she pretty?”
“Don’t stay out too late!”
He left the barracks at a near-run and did not stop until the train platform.
The conductor’s reminders looped through the passenger car the whole journey — visitors restricted to the guarded zone, departure by eight o’clock, follow First Army instructions in any emergency. Snaketooth already knew the rules. Returned workers had briefed anyone willing to listen. He sat with his hands pressed flat on his thighs and watched the forest rise up around the track and thought about nothing at all.
The platform at the Misty Forest terminus smelled of sap and cold iron. Staff were shouting lineups. Someone made a joke about grocery queues. The crowd laughed the way crowds laugh when they’re wound too tight.
Snaketooth scanned faces.
The speech was gone. Everything he had prepared — the opening, the pivot, the thing he would say if she looked uncomfortable — all of it had evacuated, leaving only a buzzing blankness and the physical fact of his own heartbeat, which had migrated to his throat.
She was shorter than he remembered. Or he had remembered her wrong, or two years had shifted the proportions somehow. She moved through the dispersing crowd with the same quality she’d always had — a forward-facing attentiveness, like someone who intended to find out what was around the next corner.
She saw him. She came directly to him, no hesitation, no performance of considering whether to approach. She took both his hands in hers.
“You’re living at Neverwinter!” she said. “That’s wonderful.”
Her hands were warm. Nothing about her touch was tentative.
Everything he’d spent two years building walls against came apart at the seams. He stood there grinning like an idiot.
They walked away from the encampment, down a narrow track into the forest where the noise thinned out and the light came through the canopy in long, refracting columns. Paper walked with the efficient energy of someone accustomed to covering ground — and talked, because Paper, Snaketooth was remembering, had always talked when she had things to say. Two years of things, apparently.
“So you came after the district was merged?”
“The whole Rat network dissolved. There were job boards in the main square, so Tigerclaw and I applied.” He shrugged. “Better wages. Closer to —” He stopped.
Paper did not follow the unfinished sentence. She said, “I couldn’t find you afterward. Once I heard Dark Corner Alley was torn down, I assumed you’d left the Western Region entirely.”
“You looked?”
“I had someone look.” She walked a few steps. “I looked later, myself.”
He held the fact of that carefully, the way you hold something fragile in a moving vehicle.
“Why didn’t you come find me once you were in Neverwinter?” she asked. Not accusatory — simply a question, the kind she’d always asked, without decoration.
“We were getting settled,” Snaketooth said. “Work every day. No fixed address for a while. We kind of —” He cleared his throat. “Lost track.”
He knew it was a worthless answer. You do not forget a person for two years unless you are actively deciding not to find them. But the truth — I was afraid of who you’d become, afraid you’d look at me and see only the Rat I used to be — had no form he could hand her.
Paper didn’t press it. “Same, honestly. At the start I barely had time to think. The construction projects needed my ability to set cement faster. Agatha needed me for experiments. The chemical plant kept asking about reaction acceleration. His Majesty says my power can raise bond energies — I’m still not entirely sure how he knew that, the theory says those particles are smaller than anything you can see, if you scaled an atom up to the size of the Longsong Theater the nucleus would fit inside a walnut —”
Snaketooth nodded. He understood perhaps one word in five. He watched her hands move as she talked — the fingers counting off items, tracing shapes in the air — watched the light catch the silver in her hair and the brightness in her eyes, and thought that this was already more than he had let himself want for a very long time.
He was close to saying something.
“Oh —” Paper switched gears the way she always had, without preamble. “Once I knew you were in Neverwinter, I asked Ms. Scroll to pull the files. Sunflower is here too. And some of the others. We could all see each other, once things settle —”
He didn’t hear the rest.
He said, “I like you, Paper.”
The words came out clean. No performance, no scaffolding — just the plain thing he had been carrying for two years, dropped into the open air between them.
Silence.
His pulse hammered against the inside of his ribs. He waited for the shape of what came next.
Paper looked at him. Her expression was bright and uncomplicated and entirely sincere.
“I like you too,” she said, “and everybody.”
Chapter 1099: I Like You and Everybody Translator: Transn Editor: Transn
The following day, a message from Neverwinter stirred the entire construction team at the front.
King Roland had granted family visits to all the laborers who had been working for more than three months. They would have a day off to spend this special day with their families whom they had been longing to see. Their family members would travel from Neverwinter to the terminus station located at the Misty Forest to meet them.
Everyone was grateful for King Roland’s kindness and compassion. The workers chanted “Long live the king” after they heard the news and worked even harder during the remainder of the day.
Snaketooth was one of them.
In fact, when the foreman had told him the news, he had literally goggled at the list in disbelief for a few minutes.
He gazed at the bottom of the list where the name “Paper” lay, his head completely blank.
“Hey, are you OK with the arrangement or not?” Snaketooth still clearly remembered that the foreman had pressed him for an answer impatiently. Indeed, he had stared at the list for quite a while before signing the paper. Snaketooth grinned every time he thought of that moment. “Just a heads up. If you disagree, you can put down another person’s name, and the Administrative Office would make an inquiry to him or her. However, if your application is rejected, you’ll lose your vacation.”
The foreman obviously wanted him to approve the list right away to save his work, but Snaketooth knew he did not understand his feeling.
Why would he want to reject it. On the very contrary, he wanted to give the official at the Administrative Office drafting this list a big kiss.
“I agree. I totally agree!”
“You should have said that earlier rather than gaping like an idiot,” the foreman grumbled scathingly while casting him a sideways glance. He went to look for the next person on the list after Snaketooth signed.
Snaketooth stood rooted there, staring at the hand with which he had put his signature in a daze.
He still felt that everything was like a dream, a dream he hoped that would last forever.
He did not have the courage to say hello to Paper in Neverwinter because he was afraid of being rejected. Paper was now a member of the Witch Union and had become much more beautiful than the frail girl he had known. If Paper did not want to associate herself with a former Rat like him anymore, his intrusion would only disturb her peaceful life.
When he saw Paper’s name appear on the list, he knew the Administrative Office had confirmed that she agreed to come and visit him.
Nothing could be more exciting than spending time alone with Paper. He was happy that Paper did not reject him.
Snaketooth waited for the family visiting day in great anxiety and excitement.
Since the train could only carry around 100 people at a time due to its limited transportation capacity, Snaketooth had to wait for a week for his turn, although Paper was on the list of the first round of the visitors.
“Hey man, it’s your turn today?”
“Look at you! It’s a girl, isn’t it?”
“Don’t stay up too late!”
Snaketooth went all red as his fellow workers jested. He dashed out of the room in embarrassment.
He heaved a deep sigh of relief after finally boarding the train. Anyway, he would be meeting Paper in two hours.
The train conductor reminded them of the rules pertaining to family visits every now and then. For example, visitors were not allowed to go beyond the guarding zone and had to leave before 8:00 PM. They also should follow the First Army’s instructions in the event of an emergency. Snaketooth had learned all the rules by heart, as some returned visitors had already told him.
With a long, shrill whistle, the train staggered to a stop at the terminus station at the Misty Forest.
“Get off the train. Line up and don’t push!” The train staff hollered. “It isn’t grocery shopping. There’s no need to fear that the food would be sold out.”
The crowd erupted into a laughter.
Snaketooth felt his heart thumping in his throat.
He could barely contain himself.
He had pictured his meeting with Paper numerous times in his head and had also rehearsed his speech over and over again. However, he was now groping for words like a dunce.
When that pretty girl appeared in front of him, Snaketooth forgot all about his prepared speech. No words came out of his mouth. He simply grinned at her, feeling very stupid.
“You’re living at Neverwinter. That’s awesome!” The girl trotted to him and held his hands. She neither hesitated nor showed any reluctance to touch him. Everything was just like what it had been like two years ago. Her bright smile instantly eased his mind.
At that moment, Snaketooth believed that he had made the right choice to come to Neverwinter.
…
“So, you came here after the Longsong District was merged?”
The pair of the two walked abreast along a path leading to the depth of the forest far away from the boisterous encampment so that they could have some privacy. Paper appeared to have a lot to say as if she wanted to fill in the gap between them. Snaketooth, on the other hand, answered every question Paper asked. They were now more like friends than a superior and a subordinate.
“The entire Rat organization has been uprooted. There were many job postings on the square, so I applied for one. If I continued to be a Rat, I would have got in trouble,” Snaketooth said while nodding. “Tigerclaw and I decided to work in Neverwinter, as the pay is higher here. Plus…”
“It’s closer to you,” he left the remaining words unsaid.
“No wonder I didn’t find you guys. I didn’t know you already left there,” Paper remarked with a mixed feeling.
“You went back to… the Longsong District later?”
“I asked someone to look for you,” the girl said slowly. “After I learned that the entire Dark Corner Alley was torn down, I thought you left the Western Region.”
“Oh… I see.”
“But why didn’t you come to see me after you came to Neverwinter?” Paper questioned.
“Well… it’s a long story.” Snaketooth said on a cough. “Tigerclaw and I had nothing at that time. We didn’t have a permanent residence and we worked all day, so we kind of forgot.”
It was such a poor excuse. Nobody could ever completely forget a person for two years. That simply meant he did not care about her. However, Snaketooth would never tell Paper that he was trying to dodge her.
Fortunately, Paper did not probe into the matter. She said, ” Same here. I was so busy at the beginning after I moved to Neverwinter. I have to help the construction team to make cement settle faster. I have to assist Ms. Agatha, and I also have to help the chemical plant to manufacture various strange stuff,” Paper said as she counted things off on her fingers. ” His Majesty says my ability can accelerate reaction processes and increase bond energies. I wonder how he knew it. According to the book, those particles are even smaller than sesame. Can you imagine that? If an atom is as big as the Longsong Theater, its nucleus is smaller than a walnut…”
Snaketooth did not understand a single word Paper was saying but he kept nodding, pretending to be interested in the topic. For a split second, he noticed Paper’s change and the difference between them. He looked at her with utmost attentiveness, his eyes flitting from her glistening eyes and long eyelashes to the delicate tip of her nose and moving lips, fascinated by everything about her.
Snaketooth was almost about to confess to her.
“By the way,” After talking about her own experience, Paper switched the subject, “after I learned that you were in Neverwinter, I asked Ms. Scroll to look up the files and found that Sunflower and the others also came here. That’s so nice. We can hang out together in the future…”
Snaketooth was not paying attention to the latter half her sentence. He was too occupied by his own thought.
So he confessed his love.
“I like you, Paper!” he blurted out.
Immediately, he realized what he had done.
His heart was beating suffocatingly in his chest. An indescribable nervousness prevailed him.
For a moment, Snaketooth regretted being so impulsive.
However, to his surprise, Paper replied to him at once.
She answered brightly with a smile, “I like you too, and also everybody.”