Chapter Forty-One: Blossoming with Flowers

"Momo, can you actually understand her?" Chi Sui asked, eyes wide with disbelief.

"Not really," Momo replied, blinking with an innocent expression.

"Then how do you know what she means?"

"I guess! Pretty impressive, right?" Momo puffed out her chest and giggled foolishly.

"You're guessing?!"

Chi Sui’s sudden spike in volume startled both Momo and the little mushroom person, who had been standing quietly to the side, lost in her own little world.

"It’s just a guess, but since she never disagrees, it means I must be right!" Momo shrank her neck slightly, looking a bit aggrieved, then began gesturing wildly toward the mushroom person, nodding and shaking her head by turns. "If you don't believe me, ask her."

The little mushroom person, initially baffled by Momo’s frantic gesticulating, looked confused at first. But as Momo nodded and pointed toward the cave behind her, the mushroom person clapped her hands together and nodded in sudden, enlightened agreement.

"See? I told you I guessed right."

Watching this interaction, Luo Luo drifted slowly onto the top of Chi Sui’s head, opened her mouth, and finally just let out a soft "Wow."

Chi Sui, witnessing all of this, felt like something was increasingly off. Biting her lower lip, she asked the question that had just occurred to her: "Can you understand what the Green-Sprout Python says?"

Momo shook her head and replied in an exceptionally cheerful tone: "Nope, can't understand a word."

Just as I thought...

Chi Sui suppressed the urge to pinch the bridge of her nose. She had been wondering how such long, complex sentences could be translated from two simple hisses. Having known Momo for all these days, she felt like she had been gambling with her life.

"But I've known the Green-Sprout Python for a long time, so I can guess the meaning of most of its words. See? It never disagrees with what I say."

Momo would have been better off keeping that to herself; hearing this, Chi Sui felt her fists clenching uncontrollably.

"I kept saying, you two—one hissing, one squeaking—even if you’re both magical beasts, you’re completely different species; I never understood how you managed to communicate. Mr. Stone and Luo Luo are at least both insects! I never figured out what you two had in common, and it turns out it was just you guessing the whole time!"

"Momo, you really are amazing," Chi Sui said, gritting her teeth and enunciating every single word.

Momo retracted her neck and muttered, "I’m right most of the time. I really haven't been guessing wrong."

Chi Sui took a deep breath, pushing down her rising anger. The Book of Enlightenment was essentially a linguistic medium for ranch owners, allowing them to understand their contracted beasts and enabling the beasts to communicate with one another. In the environment of Purple Island, where humans and beasts lived in harmony, the local beasts were the most socialized of all. Many had even learned to speak human languages to better integrate, like how Mr. Stone and Luo Luo communicated via mental telepathy. Others, like the Cloud-Piercing Ape, were linguistic geniuses who could start speaking after just hearing a few phrases. Some beasts even held specific jobs on the island and could earn their own keep without relying on a ranch owner.

Chi Sui had once assumed that while Momo couldn't speak human language, she was fluent in "beast-speak." She hadn't realized that fluency was built entirely on imagination.

"Wu-mo, wu-mo wu-mo."

Hearing the little mushroom person’s "wu-mo" sounds again, Chi Sui felt a headache brewing and turned to Momo. "Try guessing again."

Even though the guessing method sounded incredibly unreliable, Chi Sui couldn't even manage a guess herself.

"She’s asking why we came," Momo said, barely hesitating before the words tumbled out. She thought for a moment and added, "It’s not just random guessing; there's a basis for it."

"What basis?"

"Intuition."

Once that word left her lips, Chi Sui couldn't help but clap. Beautiful. Truly, a well-reasoned argument.

Still feeling uneasy, Chi Sui simply repeated Momo’s words back to the mushroom person. To her surprise, the creature actually nodded. This affirmative response made Momo puff out her chest with pride again.

"See, Chi Sui? My intuition is always spot on."

Giving her a look of exasperation, Chi Sui began to ponder how to answer the question of why they had come. In truth, she didn't even know herself. Was it because she listened to Mr. Stone and believed they would hollow out the ranch?

Chi Sui didn't really have a visceral sense of that. Although the underground town was shocking, the long, narrow tunnel meant the distance between the surface and the underground was filled with thick soil and solid stone slabs. Even if they did dig beneath the ranch, the two sides would rarely meet. If the ground collapsed, the ones who would suffer the most were the ones living below. She hadn't fully believed Mr. Stone’s words this time.

After thinking for a long while and failing to come up with a good answer, she simply fell back on the standard introduction used when meeting magical beasts.

"Well, I am the ranch owner from Peace Ranch—the ranch right next to the cave on the surface. We’re neighbors, if you think about it."

Just as Chi Sui was about to continue, the little mushroom person suddenly jumped up.

"Wu-mo! Wu-mo wu-mo!!!"

The little mushroom person’s emotions were too intense, and the Echo Bats that had been quiet nearby began their work again. It was another relentless noise attack. Chi Sui and Luo Luo, already accustomed to it, reflexively and quickly covered their ears.

The three Pink-Ring Bees, experiencing it for the first time, were shaken straight to the ground, and Momo, caught off guard, fared no better.

Once the sound ceased, Momo stretched her body and complained, "Good thing my hearing is normal."

"That’s not the point. You’ve heard this many times now—hurry up and use your intuition to translate."

Seeing that Chi Sui wasn't concerned about her at all, Momo pouted, but dutifully translated, "She seems to be saying, 'You’re actually the ranch owner from the surface?'"

Chi Sui found it strange that she was so excited just because she was a ranch owner. "Ranch... ranch owner, is there a problem?"

Chi Sui spoke cautiously, terrified of another baptism of sound.

"Wu-mo, wu-mo!" The mushroom person’s speech accelerated, her face full of an excitement Chi Sui couldn't comprehend.

This time, before Chi Sui could ask, Momo said, "Hmm, this one is harder to guess, but it seems to be about some kind of promise."

"A promise?"

The little mushroom person nodded frantically: "Wu-mo~?"

"She’s asking if you’ve come to fulfill the promise."

Fulfill a promise? The words left Chi Sui completely bewildered. Since when did she have a promise to keep underground?

The little mushroom person noticed Chi Sui’s confusion, stretched out her hands to trace a large circle, then rested her chin on her hands and opened them up. It looked very much like...

"A flower?"

"Wu-mo wu-mo!" The little mushroom person nodded repeatedly.

This time, without waiting for Momo to translate, Chi Sui turned to look around. Everywhere she looked, there were empty flower beds. If these beds were filled with blooming flowers, matched with these structures, it would surely be beautiful—a true underground fairyland. But for now, the houses were covered in moss, stained by the passage of time.

"You mean... you want these flower beds to be filled with flowers again?"

"Wu-mo!"

The little mushroom person’s voice was filled with a joy she had never heard before.