Chapter 99
I’m translating the chapter now and keeping the in-universe emphasis and shifts in tone intact. This section has a long narrative stretch plus a scene break, so I’m shaping it into novel-style HTML paragraphs and preserving the divider as a styled block.CHAPTER_TITLE: Princess Sari
“And for now... Yeoul barely comes out of the river. I can’t even get in touch with him, and frankly, I don’t want to. He’s terrifying.”
Won Hasin shuddered as though the mere thought of it made his skin crawl.
“The shaman seems to keep in contact with Yeoul from time to time. I don’t know where they meet or what they talk about. As for Sari... every so often, I end up seeing her at a police station. And...”
Won Hasin took out his smartphone, opened the album, and tapped the video letter he had saved from Princess Sari.
“The shaman recorded this video in advance. I think it must’ve been filmed when you were on Jeju Island. Before she went to the Dragon Palace.”
The video played. On the screen, Princess Sari recited a lifeless message of encouragement for Neoul.
“I only found out later. She had it scheduled to be sent to my email. So I passed it on to the Idol Travel staff.”
Neoul remembered the Sea Witch he had met on Jeju Island, the one who had handed him the suitcase.
So she said she was sightseeing on Jeju Island then. She must have met with Auntie and recorded this.
She had come back again just in time for Neoul to obtain the rabbit’s liver, then gone all the way to the Dragon Palace with it. She had bought him five years.
She didn’t need to record a video cheering me on...
Unlike the other contestants, who had family members waiting on land to root for them, Neoul had been perfectly fine even without that. He had truly not minded at all.
What if he had been human? What if Father and the younger brother, and even the faceless elder brothers he had never met, had all been human too?
He had entertained the absurd thought, but only that much. Neoul loved Father, the Dragon King, and his younger brother, the sea snake, exactly as they were. Just as Father and the younger brother had accepted Neoul, a mermaid, as family.
Still, that unexpected video letter had been... a little nice. It gave him a new anticipation that he might one day meet his siblings.
That is all I can say to you. This concerns your father, so from here on, you must handle it yourself.
She had said that, but what if she was secretly scheming to help again from some hidden corner?
I should prepare a modest gift of thanks.
He had received so much help from the Sea Witch over the years, yet he had never properly repaid her. The next time they met, he would have to ask whether there was anything she wanted or needed.
After thinking it over, Neoul asked Won Hasin, “Then, does Auntie know about Father’s condition?”
“Well... it doesn’t seem like she doesn’t know, exactly?”
Won Hasin trailed off. It was an evasive answer.
“Be precise. Does she know or not?”
“I’d say she’s just not that interested...?”
“Excuse me?”
Neoul repeated it in disbelief.
“Not interested? Why? This is Father we’re talking about, is it not?”
Won Hasin scratched his head with visible reluctance, as though this was exactly why he had not wanted to say it.
“How should I know? The shaman must’ve told her, of course. But Lady Sari hardly ever contacts anyone, and she doesn’t ask questions about anything... She doesn’t give orders either... It’s like whether the Dragon King is sick or not doesn’t matter to her at all.”
“I-is that so...?”
Neoul lowered his gaze, a little flustered. At the edge of his vision, the face of his elder sister, now frozen in the completed video, hovered there.
He had naturally assumed she would worry about Father. He had thought the news would wound her deeply once she heard it.
When he had seen Father collapsed, Neoul had been horribly shocked, terribly uneasy, and afraid. He had simply believed all the other family members would react the same way.
“Not every child is close to their parents,” Won Hasin said.
“He may be a good father to you, but not necessarily to the others.”
Neoul slowly nodded.
“I suppose that could be...”
Watching Neoul’s gloom deepen, Won Hasin suddenly asked, “You said you had a youngest sibling? How is he? Was the Dragon King a good father to the youngest one too?”
“Father...”
Neoul tried to recall what Father had been like when he was with the youngest, Prince Morae.
But the more he thought about it, the more he realized he could count the times he had seen them together on one hand. Father was busy with his duties, and the younger brother with his training, so they were both always occupied.
They had never even sat down to eat together as a family. The palace attendants brought each of them meals to their own rooms.
The younger brother often came trotting into Neoul’s room to eat with him, but Father never did. Considering how, when Neoul had been little, Father had once fed him by hand, that made it all the stranger.
“I think Father was a little stricter with the younger brother.”
Morae was the child who would become a dragon. The heir who might one day become the next Dragon King.
“Those born with great power must learn to bear responsibility for it. They must know how to control that power calmly, no matter the circumstance. That is, I think, how he taught him.”
“So that’s why Lady Sari can beat people up and still control her strength.”
“......”
“She dodged the vital spots so neatly and still worked them over good and proper. If she hadn’t been holding back, they’d have died.”
At Won Hasin’s words, Neoul grew briefly confused. Was that what the lesson meant?
“But the younger brother is only seven years old.”
Neoul thought of his adorable little brother, the one who liked to cling to him for affection. What could a seven-year-old child possibly do with strength, however great?
“He’s nothing more than a tiny, fragile baby sea snake who gets sick all the time and begs for lullabies every day.”
Father may indeed have been strict with the younger brother, but... the younger brother had also preferred Neoul to Father ever since he first broke through his egg. Neoul, without thinking too deeply about it, had simply doted on the little brother with the big age gap between them.
According to Chief Eunuch Hong, Father and the younger brother were always at each other’s throats whenever they met, but Neoul didn’t believe it. He thought they merely had personalities that did not mesh well. They never fought in front of him.
But now that he thought about it more carefully, perhaps Father’s relationship with the younger brother really was more distant than he had realized. Had Chief Eunuch Hong been telling the truth?
“Could it be that dragons just aren’t meant to get along with each other?”
“How would I know?”
Won Hasin switched off his smartphone screen and lay back down.
“Though I really have never once seen Yeoul and Lady Sari meet or contact each other.”
Then he rolled his eyes and added, “But people don’t always keep in touch if they’re not close as family either, do they? I’ve got nothing useful to say. It could be a species thing, or your family could just be unusual. I don’t know.”
“...For now, I should speak with Auntie.”
Won Hasin’s claim that Auntie seemed uninterested in Father’s condition was just that, a guess. It was not certain. Neoul wanted to ask her directly.
Even if she appeared not to care on the surface, that did not mean she truly didn’t. Neoul knew someone like that well enough already: someone who grumbled and tormented him for no reason, acting as if she did not worry and did not care, when in truth she had always been watching over him from behind the scenes.
If Auntie truly believed it didn’t matter what became of Father, then Neoul would have to respect her will. In any case, he had never intended to depend on his elder siblings. Even alone, he would continue searching for the rabbit.
Click.
Her eyelids, fringed with thick, dense lashes, opened slowly. Then they shut again, only to open once more in a sluggish blink.
Her iris, darkened to a deep brown, flashed a sudden yellow, and the horizontal pupils hidden within the darkness became sharply visible.
Still half-dazed from sleep, the Sea Witch lazily swept her eight arms through the water, sending ripples out around her.
How long has it been?
She seemed to have slept for quite a while. Her body, which had felt as though a ten-thousand-pound weight was hanging from it, was considerably lighter now.
How far has the prince gotten, I wonder.
Had the program ended? Or was it still going? Surely he hadn’t already debuted. If possible, she hoped he still hadn’t.
She had something she needed to do in time for Neoul’s debut.
It smells like mud. Is this the West Sea?
She had fainted in the house in Eulwang-ri, but now she was underwater. Judging from the remnants of a collapsed tiled roof and the faint traces of what had once been a wall, this was the West Sea Palace.
Ever since the West Sea Dragon King had vanished long ago, his retainers had scattered and eventually died out. No one lived in the West Sea Palace anymore; only an empty palace site remained. The East Sea was much the same.
The Sea Witch was lying in the only pavilion in the dark, lonely ruin that had not yet collapsed.
Recovery is slower on land, so one of the siblings must have carried me here. This time, probably...
the princess.
Ugh. Time to get up.
She tried to raise her body, stiff from sleeping too long, and found herself meeting the gaze of someone sitting at her feet and staring intently at her.
A tall woman with her hair braided into a single plait was crouched there, almost folded in on herself, clutching the Sea Witch’s skirt tightly. The woman, delicate as a lone iris bloom, looked at her with an expressionless face.
“Why did you do that?”
The woman’s voice came out as a light rebuke. The Sea Witch gave a snort and lifted her upper body.
“What’s troubling you, Princess?”
Princess Sari, the Dragon King of the South Sea’s eldest daughter and Neoul’s elder sister, straightened from her crouched position. She let go of the Sea Witch’s skirt and sat back a little.
“Was there really a need to go that far?”
Princess Sari’s face remained blank, and her tone was as flat as ever. But within it lay a faint dissatisfaction with the Sea Witch’s utterly incomprehensible behavior.
It was a question with no subject, an impolite one at that, but the Sea Witch understood immediately. It meant, If the Dragon King dies, let him die. Why go out of your way to suffer for him?
After all, the Sea Witch had been made to languish in bed and wander through dreams for quite some time as the price for sealing the Dragon King and passing information on to Neoul.
“He’s your father, isn’t he?”
“You know that already, don’t you, Shaman? Dragons have no family affection.”
Princess Sari smiled softly.
“And I left the sea more than five hundred years ago.”
They did not especially feel affection for one another. Dragons were independent by nature, not the sort who needed constant care from birth, but there was an even bigger reason than that...
“If we lived clustered together like humans, we’d probably be drawing blood every day.”
Dragons were each extremely stubborn in their own way. Their tendency to insist on doing everything their own way made it more likely they would clash if forced into the same space.
Besides, the training needed to become a dragon was in itself a long struggle that had to be endured entirely alone. Sea snakes, once they became imugi, usually went off in search of another body of water where they could live by themselves.
Even after becoming dragons, and after becoming the masters of rivers, they never returned to their homeland. Unless news of a death came from home, perhaps. They lived for an age that seemed almost eternal, each ruling only over his or her own domain.
Rivers flowed and flowed until they finally reached the sea, but the Dragon King’s children had never felt even a trace of longing toward Father.
“By the Dragon King’s lifetime, the mountains and rivers must have changed four hundred times over. He’s had a long enough life already. It’s time for him to go.”
There was not the slightest hesitation or guilt on Princess Sari’s face as she said it. It was an awfully desolate relationship between father and daughter. In a way, it seemed almost too emotionless.
The Sea Witch stroked her hair. Princess Sari, like a child putting on an act, obediently let her head rest under the touch.
The Sea Witch said, “Neoul will be sad.”
“......Is that child’s feelings more important than your health?”
“Yes. To me, they are.”