Chapter 28: Daniel’s Story

Chapter 28: Chapter 28: Daniel’s Story

Liam didn’t have to wait long. At eight o’clock that same evening, young master Daniel called back.

Seen through the smart screen, his eyes looked complicated and carried something heavy in them besides. He looked straight at Liam and said: "Sunflower, I’ve received the measurements for that chef. His pheromone stability index and his mental power grade really have changed noticeably from his routine examination last month."

He drew a deep breath before going on: "His mental power started at C-. It’s grade C now..."

Liam nodded and picked up from there: "From the look on your face, you didn’t call to report that, and you didn’t call to discuss business either. It seems more like you have something you want to ask me."

Daniel bit at his lip, apparently caught in something extremely awkward. Liam didn’t rush him, only waited in silence for him to speak. It was a long while before he did: "I want to buy what you have, but not to sell on the market..." Daniel hesitated, and in the end told him the honest reason: "A friend of mine... his mental sea has shattered completely. Can that be cured?"

Liam raised an eyebrow, his mind working fast. Within moments he had his answer, and he asked directly: "It’s your eldest brother this happened to, isn’t it?"

Daniel exclaimed in astonishment: "How do you know?" Then, apparently realizing he had let something slip, he clapped a hand over his mouth.

The words just as I thought were written across Liam’s face. He explained: "Your brother used to appear on the galactic network constantly, but after the ship explosion last June the news about him stopped dead. My guess is that when the ship escorting the former Crown Prince to the place of exile blew up, your brother was aboard it."

The Mason line was a well-known one. It couldn’t match the Halls, but it still sat among the top ten financial houses of the Lumina galaxy, so the three brothers of the Mason main line turned up regularly in the well-known papers.

Yet after the scandal surrounding the former Crown Prince, Ethan Mason had vanished along with every trailing suspicion about the Crown Prince’s death. Some said he had died too. Others said he had become a vegetable.

Liam had also remembered that Daniel had let slip earlier that his household had its own doctor and its own medical equipment, so he had thrown out a guess. He hadn’t expected to actually dig out information this important.

Daniel sighed: "You really are very sharp. Since you’ve worked it out, I won’t hide it anymore. The one whose mental sea shattered is my eldest brother."

Liam asked the blue cat: [Would Grass Worms do anything in a case like this?]

The blue cat answered: [Ask him what level the shattering has reached. Total collapse, or is there still a little mental power left?]

Liam immediately asked Daniel: "How bad is the shattering of the mental sea? Total collapse, or is there still some mental power left?"

Daniel closed his eyes, and a tear slid down his cheek: "Total collapse. My brother is still alive, but he’s blank all over, with no awareness of the outside world at all."

The blue cat’s claws flew across the system’s holographic screen fast enough to leave afterimages. After a while it answered Liam: [His condition isn’t total collapse. At the very least there’s still a thread of mental power holding him up. It’s perfectly normal that your machines can’t detect it. In a case like this, eating Grass Worms consistently, every single day, will restore his awareness in about a year.]

The blue cat waved a paw again: [But it will only restore his awareness. As for the rest of his life, he may as well write it off.]

Liam: [There’s no way at all?]

The blue cat tapped the screen again: [There is, but it isn’t promising.] It projected an image into Liam’s mind: a vase of snow-white porcelain, with a willow sprig of three branches set in it. Liam blinked and asked, not quite certain: [Sweet Dew?]

The blue cat nodded: [That’s right. It’s a rare item that appears once the Trading Hall reaches level six. Rare, because it isn’t sold by any stall owner; it’s an item that drifts in at random. Every time one appears, people fall over each other trying to seize it, and sometimes they make enemies over it and tear through space and time to hunt each other down.]

Liam drew a deep breath, then let it out in a sigh. His entire exchange with the system had taken less than a minute. In that minute Daniel had been squirming, and the hand he had tucked under his thigh was clenched hard enough to draw blood. Liam looked at him for a long moment before speaking: "If he eats them every day, his awareness will come back in about a year. But... that’s all it will do. Your brother will become an ordinary person after that. Are you certain that’s what he would want?"

Ethan Mason had been a deputy commander under the former Crown Prince, a figure who stood for the Mason family’s pride. If he woke up and discovered he had been reduced to a cripple, could he possibly accept it?

Daniel’s mouth opened and he gasped for breath, trying several times to speak and failing to get anything out. Then he broke down and wept helplessly, like a child who had lost the way home. Liam stayed silent and simply sat watching him cry. Only when Daniel had finished did he say: "Take some time to think it through, and talk to your family. Once you’ve decided, get in touch with me."

Daniel covered his eyes and said thickly: "I’m sorry. I’ve wasted your time..."

Liam shook his head: "It’s all right, I understand how you feel. My name is Liam Martinez. Just call me Liam. Even if this doesn’t work out, I hope the two of us can still talk as friends."

Daniel sniffled and said: "Thank you. I’m in a very bad way right now and I’ve no idea who to pour it out to. Could I talk with you for a while?"

Liam nodded: "Of course. I don’t have any friends to talk to either. It gets rather lonely." 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

Daniel stood up and left his desk, dropping onto a sofa. He pulled a yellow cushion against his chest and asked: "It’s September already. Haven’t you started school?"

Liam went blank, then smiled bitterly: "A few things happened, so I couldn’t go the way I’d planned. Besides, I never liked that school much. All I like is drawing and cooking and growing things. Meanwhile my family enrolled me in Contemporary Dance Art. I’d bet that if I got up on a stage I’d dance like a star-beast with a broken leg."

Daniel was startled into laughing out loud by the comparison, and the grief inside him eased a little. He said: "Don’t I know it. My Papa said that with a face as beautiful as mine I ought to go into music. Then at the entrance exam we discovered I’m tone deaf, that I sing off-key and play off-tempo. So my second brother had to pull strings to shift me over to Economics. When I finished, my Daddy tossed me a restaurant, and while it doesn’t earn much, it hasn’t gone bankrupt either..."

The two of them traded stories back and forth, and before long they had grown noticeably closer. Daniel was twenty-six, but his face was far too young, and Liam simply couldn’t get the word "brother" out of his mouth. Daniel didn’t insist, and so the two of them treated each other as equals of the same age.

They talked until well past midnight, and only when Liam could no longer stop himself nodding off did Daniel end the conversation and urge him to go and rest. Liam genuinely couldn’t hold out any longer. He yawned hugely and said: "Then I’ll go to sleep first. Good night."

"Mm, good night. I’ll let you know once my family has talked it over."

Liam nodded. Once Daniel hung up, his head tipped to one side and he was snoring. He hadn’t been asleep long when rain began to fall outside. The steady patter of it against the window glass was like a gentle lullaby.

Somewhere far away, a man was also watching the raindrops fall through the dark in silence. Over and over he refreshed his secret smart watch, as though waiting for a call or a message to come through.

Unfortunately he had been waiting a whole month, and the other person still hadn’t sent him so much as a word. The man sighed helplessly and slipped the watch back into his pocket.