Lessons on Raising a Partner

There was a special food storage room on the ship, enough for all of them to eat for several years, and there were not many people who needed to eat food on the ship. The mechanical fighters only needed to eat energy.
The food and fruit stored in the vacuum cabin were all very fresh. Today, the bunch of purple grapes on the fruit tray were sweet as honey. They were all cold and sour in one bite. The juice was rich and filled the nose full of it’s fruity aroma.
Hai’an was eating grape pulp happily.
Suddenly, a bottle was slammed down on the table beside Hai’an. He was so frightened that he jumped up. It was the bottle that Auguste prepared for him when he drank milk. But now the bottle was taller than him. It is filled with warm milk.
“This bottle is bigger than JianJian. How can he drink it?” Jamie pulled out his chair and sat down next to Auguste to watch Hai’an with him.
“If you replace the base with a smaller one, we can continue to use it.” Auguste grabbed a paper towel and wiped Hai’an’s wet hands. He carefully and gently controlled his strength for fear of hurting Hai’an.
But after the water was dried, he was still sticky and greasy. Hai’an slapped his hand on the back of Auguste’s hand, raised it and continued clapping. It seemed that the sticky feeling was very interesting. Auguste picked up Hai’an and put him in his lap to keep him from making trouble. Then he found a small spoon and scooped up the lean porridge with preserved eggs in his bowl to feed Hai’an.
Hai’an had never eaten such porridge before. After tasting a few mouthfuls, he felt that it was good. He grabbed onto Auguste’s clothes and wobbled up. He wanted Auguste to feed him a few more mouthfuls. As a result, Hai’an stepped his feet down a few times and felt the soft place under his feet harden.
Before Hai’an could recover, Auguste grabbed his collar and put him on the table. “Don’t run around.”
“Ah!” Hai’an then turned around, laid his whole body on Auguste’s arm, begging for food. Auguste filled a spoonful of porridge, fed it into Hai’an’s mouth, and rubbed Hai’an’s smooth silver hair with his fingers.
Carl looked at Auguste and Hai’an mixing oil, his heart felt full of acid as he thought of the teardrop plant in Lydney’s bedroom. His heart ached.
Carl: People must be blind.
“Hey,” Jamie glanced at Auguste with an unusual eye and decided to change the subject and get down to business. “What are you going to do about that flesh pink planet? If we don’t do something about it, we’ll either fall into its gravitational pull, or we’ll have to stay on Pyramid forever.”
“I’ve asked Alia to send mechanical fighters out to draw maps of this star region.”
“What are you looking for?” Jamie wondered, “Rescuers?”
Auguste was still slowly feeding Hai’an porridge with a spoon. “People can destroy those worms. If there are worms on that planet, I would not be afraid. I just want to know how its gravitational pull came about.”
“What did Leston say?”
Carl next to him was unhappy when he heard Leston’s name. “Don’t mention it, he told me and Auguste to drag the ship outside, saying they could escape the gravitational pull of the planet in ten years.”
Jamie: “...”
Leston was talking nonsense again.
There was a “ding” at the door. The door of the elevator opened and Alia appeared with a small remote control in her hand as she walked into the hall. “I’ve roughly mapped out the dynamic star region around us,” Alia pointed to turn on the projection. The hall lights suddenly dimmed, spot particles gradually filled the hall connected in series with each other, as if, in a moment, they would be flooded under the tide of the Star Sea.
The darkest spotted particles were meteorites, the brightest ones were stars, and the ones in the middle were Pyramid and the flesh-and-pink planet, which were interlaced with each other, shining and forming an eternal cosmic web.
This was not Hai’an first time seeing the star map, but, every time, it shocked his heart. The map showed only this small star field, but it occupied the entire hall of the ship. It was only a small corner of the universe. In this Mineral Belt 1892, every planet, or new meteorite, was hundreds or even tens of millions of times the size of Hai’an. They stayed there quietly and became the most eternal existence. They had witnessed the changes of the star chart for hundreds of millions of years. The sky of this world was still gray, dark as the sea, but it had the brightest stars.
“I also found something interesting.” When Alia pressed a button, two yellowish spots suddenly appeared on the star map, which was very obvious in a group of blue spot particles.
“The Hammers came to find us, but almost all of them collided with meteorites and fell. Several other spacecrafts escaped by chance and did not go further. But they are sending people into the meteorite belt and have not given up looking for us.”
Alia talked to them about the observed information, and the spot particles moved around and around Hai’an’s head. Hai’an jumped upward to catch a spot particle, but the light slipped through his fingers as if he could see them but not touch them.
It was dark in the hall. Hai’an staggered to his feet and took a few steps forward. He wanted to grab another grape. But Auguste quickly took Hai’an back to his arms and stuffed a skinned grape into his little white hands, so that he could eat on his arms. The lights in the hall were very poor. Auguste was afraid that Hai’an would accidentally drop off the round table, since he was so fragile and his thin arms and legs could be broken easily. If he fell down, Auguste would be heartbroken.
As for the juice dripping off of Hai’an’s mouth from the grapes, it was being ignored by Auguste.
Auguste: Wait till we have a bath together.
In Auguste’s opinion, this was the first time that Hai’an had become a man. It was normal that he couldn’t speak but he also needed to take good care of himself. He spent a good amount of time with Hai’an. For Auguste, his JianJian’s life may be short, but that didn’t matter. He would teach JianJian to walk; to speak; to write; to learn everything about the world; to take him everywhere across the stars; and to return to his homeland with JianJian in his arms.
His time is still long, but Auguste did not know how long Hai’an could accompany him. Whether he could accompany him to find his clan, and find the way back to his hometown was another matter. But one day, he would return to his homeland, if his JianJian was still alive, he would accompany him for the rest of his life; if JianJian died he would accompany him to sleep in the Starry Sea.
Hai’an huddled in Auguste’s arms. Auguste’s strong and steady heartbeat thudded through Hai’an’s body. The dragon’s warm body temperature passed to Hai’an through his thin shirt, giving Hai’an a kind of indescribable peace of mind.
But, this made Hai’an burst into tears.
In this world, only Auguste would ever accompany him.
On the continent of Nore, every elf joined the battlefield when he grew up and was then baptized by war. The forest of Elune was beautiful, but it was the last pure land of the continent of Nore.
The wars of the six major races spread to every corner of the mainland. Blood spilled on every inch of Nore’s land. Hai’an only read about those scenes of prosperity and peace in his books. Even the gentlest elves split into two camps, black and white. He was not soft-hearted in the face of his former compatriots. When Hai’an opened his eyes, he saw another world, and his heart had an indescribable feeling.
White elves didn’t like war. He could tell that the queen couldn’t stand it any longer. The moonlight flowers were wilting and the souls of elves who died had disappeared forever. No matter how many years they were, they would never come back from the tree of life. The vines they used to weave their love corollas were withering with their souls. There were countless white elves who died on the battlefield. Elves who lost their spouses would soon join the battlefield to avenge them, but they would not return. Instead, they would kneel down in the place where their loved ones died and release their own sorrow until they passed away.
Every day the Queen would sit under the tree of life and weep. She blamed herself.
When Hai’an was very young, the Queen often held him in her arms and told him stories about the old elves. She said she was sorry for them and was crestfallen that she could not give them a happy environment to grow up in. There had been no new fruit on the tree of life for a long time. Fifty years after Hai’an was born, in the whole white elf tribe, they could no longer find any smaller elves.
Hai’an remembered that on the day of his adulthood, it was raining in the Elune Forest, beating the leaves of the tree of life, splashing drops of water onto the broken flowers, playing a sorrowful song as if it was the last song of life. The elder stood under the tree and said to him, that when he opened his eyes, he would see a new world.
He had been reluctant to recall the scene, because at the moment before he closed his eyes, he seemed to see that all the moonlight around him had faded in that instant.
Hai’an was the smallest and youngest of all the white elves. His friends participated in the adult ceremony long before him. But after the ceremony, Hai’an never saw them again. One of the last things Hai’an saw were the rattan flowers, which represented his friends, withering on the tree of life and dispersing the petals with the night wind.
He had also been deceiving himself, thinking that maybe every elf would go to a different world when he grew up. But wherever he went, he was alone.
Hai’an grabbed Auguste’s arm, and tears trickled down his face. He sniffed and stretched out his hand to wipe the tears off his face, but the next moment new tears would wet his cheeks.
Auguste soon felt the coolness on his arm. At first, he thought it was just the juice from Hai’an’s grapes, but soon he heard Hai’an’s gentle sobs.
Looking down, Hai’an’s eyes and nose was red. His small face was full of tears.
Auguste held Hai’an up a little and asked in a low voice, “Why are you crying?”
The other crew members heard Auguste’s voice and looked toward them and found that JianJian was actually crying.
Hai’an did not want them to see him crying. He turned his head, buried his face in Auguste’s arms, and held his shirt tightly in his small hands.