Bread and Poetry

Morning. Time to wake up.

Climbing out of a soft bed was a true test of willpower.

By the entryway in the living room, beside Roy's mud-caked shoes, lay a finely crafted deerskin boot. Its mate rested against the door. It seemed Ms. Belinda had come back last night. Sure enough, a dress hung over a chair.

Making breakfast was no trouble. All he had to do was peel a breadfruit and prepare a fragrant cup of tea.

Roy had always thought breadfruit was a miraculous thing.

It required neither flour nor an oven, though it really did not suit Roy's tastes. Still, there was nothing to be done. Everyone ate it.

Flour could also be bought at Castleton Harbour, but food from the Human World sold for exorbitant prices in the Elven World, and Roy did not know how to bake bread anyway.

The breadfruit eaten by elves was vastly different from the kind Roy had seen in his previous life, aside from sharing the same name...

This breadfruit was more like a durian.

It grew within a hard, spiky shell. Once ripe, the shell easily split into five sections, revealing flesh that lay inside like croissants. However, breadfruit flesh was not very sweet and carried a fresh woody fragrance. It could be eaten directly or dipped in salt.

Roy broke open a quarter of a breadfruit, served himself one portion, placed another on a porcelain plate, and prepared a cup of balsam honey tea for Belinda.

He drank a cup of diluted Tree of Life Sap instead. It slowed aging.

There was a Tree of Life in Central Garden, Castleton City, which had grown for nearly five thousand years. The Silver Moon Elves in the city could receive a portion there every month.

Belinda was always worried that Roy was growing too quickly. She often said she had dreamed of Roy dying in her arms, so she insisted that he drink it every day.

Sitting at the dining table, he ate the bland food.

Before transmigrating into this world, he had been a third-year college student cramming before final exams. That day, Roy had rushed early to the library to claim a seat. The library was crowded, and even though he had arrived very early, nearly every desk had been claimed with personal books...

He walked forward along row after row of bookshelves, curious about how many rows there were on the library's second floor. His attention soon focused on that question, and he always felt as though he could never reach the end.

Eventually, he realized he could no longer see any other students around him. He had not expected the library to have such a quiet area. It was rather incredible.

The books on the shelves all appeared to be in foreign languages, but the writing was neither English, French, German, Italian, nor Japanese. It looked like incomprehensible Ghost Talismans.

He casually pulled out a heavy ancient book with a copper cover. Two elves were depicted on it: one held a longsword, while the other held a staff. They faced each other and gazed up at a crescent moon above them. Though he could not understand the words, the illustrations inside seemed to describe the Elven World.

Roy had actually wanted to keep flipping through it, mainly to see whether the illustrations contained beautiful elf women. Elves' slender figures suited Chinese aesthetic tastes very well.

He had only turned a few pages when the rest of the book began flipping by itself, faster and faster, like a bill-counting machine. In just a few seconds, the entire book had flipped from beginning to end.

At the very end of the book was an enormous vortex, like a massive black hole.

It swallowed Roy in an instant. He had no chance to struggle or call for help.

He had no idea how long he had slept in the darkness. When Roy opened his eyes, he discovered that he had arrived in this Elven Kingdom and had become Ms. Belinda's son.

This elf mother, who looked nothing like him, treated him fairly well.

However, she was the artsy sort of petite-bourgeois female elf. Nearly all the money she earned went toward enjoying life. She was always sentimental, loved pursuing both material and spiritual pleasures, and often wore beautiful clothes to various balls.

She was a pure-blooded Silver Moon Elf, so whenever she put on formal attire, she could attend balls in all sorts of places.

Roy could not. Even though Belinda guaranteed that he was a Half-Elf with Silver Moon Elf blood, the guards at many ballrooms refused to let in a Half-Elf who looked so much like a human.

Every time, Roy obediently waited beside the flowerbeds outside the ballroom and reassured Belinda that he did not like dancing at all.

How could there be an elf who did not like dancing?

Ms. Belinda believed Roy was simply comforting her. Later, she gradually took him to fewer and fewer balls.

Recently, Ms. Belinda had found a new job as an assistant to a sculptor in the city. Although she only did miscellaneous chores every day, such a job with a strong artistic atmosphere suited her perfectly.

Ms. Belinda came downstairs from upstairs yawning, dressed in a cool nightgown and barefoot. Her snow-white arms were almost entirely exposed, and the nightgown clung to her slender body, concealing very little.

She dressed like this almost all the time when she was at home.

For a Silver Moon Elf not yet three hundred years old, she was still very young. In the Human World, she would have been around twenty-eight or twenty-nine.

Her silver hair was casually tied into a bun atop her head. Heavy bags hung beneath her large blue eyes, which became slightly puffy whenever she did not get enough sleep.

She was not an exceptionally beautiful elf, but she understood herself and knew how to dress. She always gave off an air of intelligence.

After sitting at the table, she first looked Roy over from head to toe, then took a sip of honey tea before scooping breadfruit from her plate with a spoon.

The way she ate breadfruit made it look as though she were eating ice cream.

"How was yesterday?"

Ms. Belinda tried to pinch Roy's cheek, but he turned his head and avoided her.

"Same as usual. I was thinking of going fishing by the sea today."

Roy put down his spoon and voiced his plan.

Belinda hesitated only briefly before saying, "Fine, but don't pick those shellfish off the Rock Wall again. They look like slugs when you eat them. Just looking at them makes me sick."

Roy shrugged. "All right! But they really are delicious, especially with a little lemon juice."

Then came Ms. Belinda's nagging time.

Like all mothers, Ms. Belinda always had this expectation or that expectation for Roy.

"You need to learn how an elf should behave and live. After all, you live in the Elven Kingdom. I really do not know where you learned all these human habits. Could it be that the human talent hidden in your body has awakened?" Ms. Belinda was quite helpless about this.

Remembering the task she had assigned Roy, Ms. Belinda asked him:

"Have you finished the poetry collection I gave you last week?"

Roy answered stiffly, "I read a little."

In truth, he could not even remember where in his room he had put that book.

Elven poetry...

Just thinking about it made Roy feel awful.

"That will not do. We Silver Moon Elves would rather go without bread than without poetry..." Belinda nagged Roy.

Roy refused to back down. "I know. If there's no bread, we can still eat fish."

Breakfast was simple. There were only two plates and cups to wash, and Roy did almost all of it.

After breakfast, Ms. Belinda went to work at the Art Gallery wearing a new dress patterned with maple leaves.

Roy thoroughly scrubbed his shoes, which were covered in foul-smelling mud, and set them out on the second-floor terrace to dry. Then he carried a fishing rod and wooden bucket out of the house. Following the Da Nei River downstream would lead him to the sea. There was a rocky area at the river mouth that was ideal for fishing.

Elves generally did not like waking up too early, except for those who needed to collect dew in the orchards in the morning.

The street was quiet, but very clean.

The Da Nei River ran along one side of the street, while wooden houses on the other side housed several shops. The shop closest to Roy's home sold breadfruit. It actually stocked quite a few other kinds of fruit too, but Roy did not think they could serve as breakfast, so he ate only breadfruit every morning.

There was also a Potion Shop at the street corner. Its shelves were filled with test tubes containing liquids of all colors. It was said that many of them were expensive magical potions.

Roy knew nothing about such things, but he was familiar with the Night Blade Leopard cub tied outside the Potion Shop. Occasionally, he even brought it one or two Sea Fish to eat.

Nearly all the buildings on this street were ordinary two-story wooden houses. The paint outside many of them had been applied countless times. Living by the sea was bad in this regard: everything seemed damp all year round, and even the wind carried a strong fishy smell.

Further ahead from the street corner, a Goddess of Freedom Temple stood on a slightly raised Rock Wall. It was said that every weekend morning, groups of people came to pray, then sat together to sing. Sabrina, the eldest daughter of their neighbor Ms. Jillian, was a member of the temple choir.

Roy had always wanted to take a look inside, but every time he passed its gates and saw, through the iron bars, the statue of the Goddess holding a scepter at the center of the flowerbed in the temple courtyard, his steps would hesitate...

Standing by the roadside, Roy saw a blurred figure emerge from the corner of the temple's northern wall in the distance. The person suddenly sprang out from the wall, tumbled into the wild grass outside, and then vanished from sight.

Roy did not pay much attention to it. A thief daring to climb walls at this hour of the morning might be an elf secretly meeting one of the Priests in the temple.

From here, he could take in the entire harbour at a glance. More than a dozen Three-Masted Sailboats were moored at the docks, while there were dozens of small Fishing Boats. The tide had just gone out, and only the smallest fishing boats could put to sea at such a low water level. The larger ships would have to wait for the next high tide.

Beside the docks stretched a golden beach. As the sea receded, it left countless shells scattered across the sand.

Barefoot and wearing overalls, Roy rolled up his trouser legs and ran down the beach in great strides.

The distant Sea Surface merged with the sky. Roy first dug up some Sand Worms from the beach and put them in his wooden bucket. Then he carried his fishing rod to the rocky shore, climbed onto a massive reef closest to the sea, and found it covered with oysters. Many places were painfully sharp underfoot, and the few spots where one could stand had all been cleared out little by little by Roy.

This was where he fished.

Standing on the reef.

Roy looked toward the end of the sea, wondering what kind of kingdoms lay beyond it...