After I Transmigrated as a Mermaid, I Transmigrated Back - Chapter Two

Chapter 2: I Transmigrated Back (2) 

Editor: Serina
Translator: Confuzzled Kin

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Zhao Xiaokui didn’t let Shen Zhifei wait for too long.

After about 10 minutes, she had managed to compose herself, stepping out of the restroom in her heels.

When she became a mermaid, she had yet to learn how to apply makeup so she simply wiped all of it off her face, using a makeup remover she found in her bag.

The bare faced Zhao Xiaokui was still unbelievably beautiful. She appeared a lot younger without her previous mature makeup. So when she sat back down across from Shen Zhifei, the latter was slightly dumbfounded —— she hadn’t expected Zhao Xiaokui to look so… delicate.

She was obviously a twenty-three year old college graduate but she looked like she was seventeen or eighteen years old. She had a fair complexion and lustrous skin, not to mention her face still had traces of baby fat.

“I’m sorry, can you please repeat what you just said?”

Zhao Xiaokui tried to keep a straight face, trying to make herself appear more like a 23-year-old adult, however, Shen Zhifei inexplicably smiled. It was as if she was seeing her little 3-year-old niece, wearing her mother’s high-heels and pretending to be an adult when she talked to her. She then noticed Zhao Xiaokui’s red eyes, as if she had just cried.

Was it…for Rong Zhen?

Shen Zhifei couldn’t help but wonder if she was forcing apart a loving couple. She pondered over whether she should just give in and let them be together.

In any case, the marriage contract between her and Rong Zhen was just something set by the older generation, and the reason why she was willing to fulfill it was just to make the elders happy.

To her…marriage was just a special contract, not a necessity.

She thought so in her heart, but she still repeated what she said earlier and emphasized her appreciation for Zhao Xiaokui.

Meanwhile, Zhao Xiaokui tried to sort out the information she had gotten from her (SZF) words——

So, “she” had gotten together with a rich and powerful man, but he already had a fiancée and now the fiancée came knocking on “her” door with five million dollars, hoping that “she” would leave her fiancé alone.

「What ancient idol drama¹ plot…」

It went out of fashion the year she transmigrated, okay?! 

With so many words in her heart, Zhao Xiaokoi tried her best to chase away the other woman. She stood up and tossed away the check as she loudly declared, “You can insult me but definitely not my feelings.” She pretended to have passed through strong wind and heavy rains². “The relationship between Rong Zhen and I is not what you have imagined, and if it causes you distress, I will try to distance myself from your fiancé as much as possible. Please control your own man as well.”

She tossed back the hefty check with an indifferent expression, keeping her internal scream of “Five million dollars! I’ve never seen that much money in my f*cking life” safely locked away in her mind.

With an aching heart and a face that still had to act as if nothing was wrong, Zhao Xiaokui felt that her lifelong acting skills were still online.

Shen Zhifei was stunned and apologized, “Sorry, It was me who was impetuous.”

Although others perceived there was an ambiguous relationship between Zhao Xiaokui and Rong Zhen, both were chaste and there wasn’t anything going on between them.

What she had said was nothing more than a person’s fanciful thinking, the other woman simply enticing a man with more money than sense.

Her gamble had paid off.

Zhao Xiaokui breathed out a sigh of relief.

It wasn’t like she had been completely idle in the restroom; when she realized she’d transmigrated back, she quickly went through “her” phone.

Fortunately, the former “her” didn’t have the habit of deleting her chat history, whether it be text messages or conversations on various social media. She could even find records from long ago.

The conversation between “her” manager and assistant, which was at the top of the log, made her guess that “her” identity was an artist or a singer.

Considering the content of their (SZF&ZXK) conversation was related to Rong Zhen, she searched all the chats in her contacts that were pronounced “Rong Zhen”.

Rong was an uncommon surname, and the name Rong Zhen was easy for her to find.

The chats were not as mushy nor clingy as she had imagined between a mistress and her financial backer. On the contrary, it was business-like to the point of impatience——and adding to her surprise, it was “her” who was impatient, not Rong Zhen.

The man on the other side of the conversation obviously had a considerable amount of affection for “her”, but “she” always seemed very polite.

So there were only two likely scenarios——

Either Rong Zhen was harassing her because he was rich and powerful or “her” skill in hooking up with people was so advanced that she couldn’t figure it out.

But the final conclusion was the same: it was correct to not admit to it anyway.

Although Zhao Xiaokui didn’t have much experience with emotions, she had watched a lot of TV dramas, the backstabbing tricks learned from the green tea bi*ches coming in handy at this point.

It was clear from Shen Zhifei’s attitude that she had done the right thing.

Not giving Shen Zhifei the chance to continue, since she didn’t know how to act any further, Zhao Xiaokui pretended to be insulted as she stood up sharply, “Sorry, I still have things to do, so I’ll be leaving first.”

With that, she took her small bag, turned away and pushed open the door of the cafe.

She left quickly, not giving Shen Zhi Fei any chance to make her stay.

Fall started in early August yet it’s formidable winds were awfully strong. When the cold air tugged on the hem of her dress, the hot air hit her face.

Zhao Xiaokui didn’t feel uncomfortable however, instead, she felt more alive.

She took a deep breath, the scent of car exhaust and burnt asphalt highways were so fragrant to her.

It was good to be a human again.

    ……

Zhao Xiaokui was worried that Shen Zhifei would catch up so she quickly strode away as soon as she left the cafe.

Recalling that she still seemed to be a somewhat famous artist now, she put the sunglasses from her bag on as she walked.

Fortunately, most of the surrounding societal elites were in a hurry. Seven out of ten of them were looking down at their phones, not even noticing her presence.

After turning two corners, Zhao Xiaokui let out a relieved, drawn out sigh.

It was only then that she had the mood to observe her surroundings. 

Someone had once said that the bigger the city, the more similar it would look, but a forest built with reinforced concrete would always brim with nostalgia³. 

Zhao Xiaokui tried finding the iconic buildings in the city, but all she could see were that the clouds above the buildings seemed to resemble dogs.

“Why did I ever have confidence in my sense of direction…?”

After sighing, Zhao Xiaokui resigned herself to her fate and pulled out her phone to open GD Map.

“Pedestrian navigation begins…”

In a span of five years, electronic gadgets had changed rapidly. When she’d first transmigrated, Carrot 4 had only just entered the market with a price tag of nearly 10,000 yuan, disheartening poor high school students. Now, the phone in her hand was already a Carrot 8. Compared to the 4th generation which was thick and awkward to hold, it was half the weight and thin. Another good thing was that there weren’t too many changes to its user interface so Zhao Xiaokui got started quickly. After shrinking the navigation, she browsed through the contents in the phone.

She still had a problem she couldn’t answer——

Five years ago, she transmigrated over into the deep sea after she got drunk, so who was the ‘Zhao Xiaokui’ that lived in place of her during those years?

There were countless theories lingering in Zhao Xiaokui’s mind at this point, ranging from the fact that she hadn’t actually transmigrated and that turning into a mermaid was just a weird dream, or she had indeed crossed over but it was only a part of her consciousness while the other part remained inside her body, just like a mythical technique, or maybe in the last five years she had been transmigrated, someone had taken over her body and had stolen her identity…

As doubts loomed in Zhao Xiaokui’s mind, even the question of why she had transmigrated had to be addressed later.

She desperately needed to understand what had happened the past five years.

As luck would have it, in this era, there was no need for a diary for even a small phone could hold records of a person’s past clearly.

Starting from communication software such as SMS, contacts and other various apps, every message was collected by Zhao Xiaokui.

It was not her!

Zhao Xiaokui’s heart surged with shock as her expression became more and more grave.

No one knew better than Zhao Xiaokui what kind of person she was. During the past five years in the deep sea, in order to prove that her past memories were not illusions, she analyzed almost every fiber of the being called “Zhao Xiaokui” and she couldn’t be more familiar with it. She knew that what was engraved in her bones would not change even with the passage of time.

She might take off her sneakers and start putting on high heels and a long skirt or she might go from being a plain, piggish girl who never leaves her house to being a sophisticated little fairy, but there was no way she would suddenly become an expert mistress, bouncing between and easily being able to confidently get together with several men. Not to mention her EQ wouldn’t be high enough to support these kinds of matters. She had been taught since childhood that one was one and two was two⁴.  when it came to relationships and feelings. There were absolutely no such halfhearted or unexpressed feelings.

Zhao Xiaokui paused and closed her eyes for a moment to recall her memories. She opened her eyes and opened the QQ penguin app⁵ to type in an account name and password for a second/alternate account.

After waiting for a while, a Penguin account profile/page appeared on the screen.

   It was the account she used before she transmigrated.

The avatar was her hand-painted sunflower and her username was ‘Little Sunflower’. Her signature/bio was still the one she had written shortly before her college entrance exam: “What to do if the child has a bad cough? It’ll be better after a good beating.”

After opening a group chat, she felt as if she had gone back in time five years. A saying she had written during that summer five years ago prominently displayed, amongst the idle gossip and chatting with her close friends. It was a wave of nostalgia.

Ah——

Zhao Xiaokui heaved a relieved sigh in her heart.

It seems I haven’t crossed over into some parallel world myself, and it wasn’t me who had the problems, but the former ‘Zhao Xiaokui’…

She assumed that after she had gone into shock while drunk, her soul had vacated her body, resulting in it being taken over by a stray ghost from somewhere.

If it was the old Zhao Xiaokui, she would have screamed and fainted at the thought of her body being taken over by some ghost.

But all she was thinking about now, was to wait until she was home, to check her health and body to see if there were any problems….

Although the mermaids in the deep sea were cruel, as a major race, they were rich in knowledge. Zhao Xiaokui, who was disinterested in fighting or exploring, had gnawed on a lot of stuff in her head over the past five years.

Among them, there was no shortage of information on the damage that could be caused by a human body being occupied by a ghost and the healing method for it.   

As for the outsider itself, Zhao Xiaokui wasn’t too worried.

One reason was that she didn’t feel any sense of danger and thought that the external soul wouldn’t be too powerful, and for another reason….

 While she always considered herself human, she still inherited the talents of a mermaid.

As hunters, merfolks were not even slightly inferior to any other species when it came to playing with souls.

In just the short period of time she’d been walking over with the help of the  navigation, she’d seen several people whose souls didn’t match their  external appearance enough, causing them to appear as illusionary shadows in her eyes.

 Sigh… plastic surgery technology has really become more advanced these recent years. 

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So, yeah, double update ahem cause I’ve neglected this for sometime and made a few mistakes in publishing the chapter before.

1. Idol drama here means ‘drama series where actors are chosen for their preexisting popularity with young viewers’.
2. gone through a lot in life. lll E/N: Though in this case it suggests a difficult ordeal.
3. E/N: The forests in this sense refers to sky-scrapers and tall buildings and a collection of them, and given she’s been away for so long, it fills her with a feeling of having seen it before, in this case, Nostalgia is a far, far better term.
   Bustling metropolises are sometimes referred to as forests of Steel and concrete
4. things ought to be perfectly clear cut with no doubts.
5. It’s an app in China that’s used for chatting and much more… “QQ offers services that provide online social games, music, shopping, microblogging, movies, and group and voice chat software.”