Chapter Thirty: The Beach House Is Open for Business / Chapter Thirty-One: The Sound of Tides from the Past

By the way, because Ryo had slept in, she was the third-to-last person to arrive at the Beach House. She had even specifically asked for a bowl of fried rice.

Kita and Ichiri arrived together, coming in as the second-to-last and last people at the Beach House.

"Ichiri, your clothes..." The moment Shiko saw the state they were in, her face flushed with embarrassment.

Only then did Ichiri realize that her clothes were rather disheveled. She trembled all over and shrank behind Kita, using her body as a shield. Only then did she avoid bursting apart.

"Wow, Ichiri has really nice boobs." Shiko cupped her cheeks, looking utterly entranced.

That was too much for everyone. Ichiri lost consciousness and collapsed against Kita's back. Kita's face was bright red, but she couldn't think of anything to say. Nijika was relatively used to it, but she nearly spilled the plate of curry she was carrying. Ryo laughed without the slightest restraint. Beside her, Lisa, who had been eating, spat a mouthful of water directly onto Yukina's face. Yukina seemed not to notice, merely stirring her spoon around her plate absentmindedly. Sayo was chewing her fries forcefully to keep her expression under control. Ako's face was a little red, but her eyes involuntarily drifted toward Rinko beside her. Rinko felt uncomfortable all over and tried to hunch her back to hide her chest, but she didn't seem very successful.

"Y-you... what are you talking about... Wu-san..." Kita had stuttered a little too many times today.

"What? It's only boobs." Shiko's voice was perfectly calm.

"That's exactly the problem! Please don't say that anymore! If you're playing someone, could you play somebody else?"

"Mu-q! Then let's do that!" Shiko immediately switched the doll in her hands for a teddy bear, and her voice became cute and innocent.

Kita sighed in relief. "This Beach House is..."

"I built it with Nijika, Ako, and Rinko!" Shiko looked extremely proud.

"Oh, I see." Kita's tone unconsciously shifted into her "talking to a child" voice. "Actually, I came to ask Wu-san for help. The swimsuit for Gotou-san has already been designed!"

"I see." Shiko looked over the design Kita handed her. Sure enough, there were no measurements on it, only a design.

"Mu-q! I have a question!" She raised her right hand, curling her thin index finger and thumb toward Kita. "Why is there so little fabric?"

That innocent question changed the atmosphere in the Beach House. Kita felt everyone's gazes toward her turn disdainful.

Shiko, who had caused the situation, merely looked at her with innocent eyes. Kita felt that there was a hint of amusement in them.

Fortunately, Gotou-san still hadn't woken up. The Gotou-san lying unconscious on her back became Kita's only salvation.

In the end, after waking up, Ichiri calmly put on the swimsuit Ichiri had given her. It wasn't very cute, but at least it was conservative. Everyone else changed into their own swimsuits as well. Naturally, all the swimsuits had been provided by Shiko, while Ryo and Rinko handled the designs. Shiko, who had changed back into herself, firmly refused to wear one, but under everyone else's intense insistence, she put on a swimsuit after all—a school swimsuit. She also threw a jacket over it. "It's obviously cute, isn't it? Why are you all so disappointed?" she said.

After eating, several people went to the beach. The others sat around in the Beach House for a while before leaving to do their own things. Soon, only Shiko, Nijika, and Ichiri remained in the Beach House. Shiko was washing dishes. It was completely unnecessary, but she was still doing it seriously. As she washed, she hummed a short melody.

"Why are you washing them?" Nijika asked while helping.

Shiko stopped humming and glanced at the three dolls sitting nearby.

"I just... wanted to experience what their lives were like on the Shizuku route."

"Ah, Little Shiko did say that this Beach House was just like the one in that game." Nijika recalled what she had said earlier.

"Yeah." Shiko took the next plate Ichiri handed her. "On the Shizuku route, Hiyori, Tsumugi, and Shizuku provide free curry at the Beach House every day."

With Nijika and Ichiri's help, the dishes and cleaning were finished quickly.

"Wow, they're playing beach volleyball." Nijika looked outside. "Want to go together?" she invited them. The two gloomy girls naturally shook their heads.

"Then I'll go first." Nijika said goodbye to them and joined the others' games.

Now, only Ichiri and Shiko remained in the Beach House. Shiko sat down beside the door and looked toward the distant ocean, listening to the waves.

Ichiri sat down beside her.

"Not going?" Shiko asked a pointless question.

Ichiri seemed to be trembling. "If I leave here, I feel like Kita-san will immediately set her sights on me."

Shiko laughed awkwardly twice. Sure enough, being too enthusiastic still frightened Ichiri.

"Then let's stay here and take it easy." She leaned comfortably against the wooden wall and stopped talking. Ichiri imitated her and leaned against the wall as well.

The sound of the wind.

The sound of the waves.

The sound of people playing.

The two of them didn't speak at all.

Chapter Thirty: The Beach House Is Open for Business

Ichiri and Shiko sat side by side like two statues.

It wasn't that they were especially gloomy. Shiko had gradually grown used to communicating with people she knew, but at present she was focused on figuring out how to solve her own problems and barely noticed anything around her. As for Ichiri—she really would never speak first if there was nothing to say. Besides, as long as she could be alone with Shiko, she was already happy. Not to mention that neither of them found this quiet atmosphere awkward.

In short, until Yukina returned with paper and a pen, they made no sound except for occasionally changing positions.

"..." Yukina watched them from a distance. She wasn't sure whether she should go over and disturb the atmosphere between them. If she simply found a place to sit and did her own thing, that also seemed rather impolite.

Thus, another statue appeared outside the Beach House.

Ryo had just escaped from the sea. She looked at the shark fin floating on the surface and still felt shaken. She had been swimming peacefully when this thing suddenly appeared and nearly scared her into becoming Bocchi. However, now that she was ashore, her confidence returned. A low sound wave instantly split the waves apart, fully revealing the creature beneath the fin.

"..." Beneath the fin was merely a strange fish about as long as an arm. The sound wave had happened to cut it in half, and when the seawater closed again, it had already been stirred into the surf as sand.

Either way, she should go eat some shaved ice to calm her nerves.

Blue Hawaii flavor.

However, when she approached the Beach House, she saw Bocchi and Shiko sitting together, while Yukina silently watched the bizarre scene. Her first reaction was to check behind herself. After confirming that nobody else was following her, she tidied her hair and walked over to Yukina.

"What are you doing?"

Yukina turned her head. "Yamada-san. The atmosphere over there made me feel rather bad about interrupting."

Ryo glanced toward Ichiri and Shiko. Then she strolled over.

"Yo," she greeted them.

Shiko stood up and began doing what a shopkeeper was supposed to do. Everything seemed normal. Watching from this side, Yukina began to wonder if she had been overthinking things. Fortunately, Ryo had broken the stalemate first, so Yukina followed suit, asked for a glass of water, and sat down beside the table.

Shiko also made herself a bowl of shaved ice, Blue Hawaii flavor.

"Ichiri, do you want some?" she called from the kitchen.

Ichiri suddenly snapped awake. "Huh? Oh... honey flavor is fine."

"One million yen," Shiko instinctively replied.

"Huh?" Ichiri froze.

Ryo muttered, "Are you playing Shizuku or Aoi...?"

Shiko handed the shaved ice to Ryo. "Sorry for the poor service!"

"You've mixed up your roles..."

Ryo soon left, and the shop fell quiet again. Ichiri and Shiko returned to their seats by the door and ate their shaved ice. Apart from the clinking of spoons against bowls, Yukina's soft scratching as she wrote had been added to the silence. She said she was organizing information about the characteristics of monsters in the ocean and considering her plans for what to do next.

There was one more person, even if she also wasn't speaking, but Ichiri seemed to sense the change in the atmosphere. She gradually felt too embarrassed to keep spacing out and remain silent. Shiko still looked absent-minded, but Ichiri had to find a topic...

She held it in for a long time.

"Ahaha, the ocean sure is beautiful." Sorry, this is the only thing I could think of.

"Yeah." Shiko looked as though she were responding automatically.

"..."

Silence again.

Ichiri was panicking. If only she were Kita-san, she would know what to do in a situation like this. But she wasn't Kita-san, and she didn't possess Shiko's ability to play other people so freely. I'm sorry. Even after spending so much time with Kita-san, I haven't learned a single thing from her. I'm really just a slipperwort, a nozuchi snake...

The movement beside her drew Shiko and Yukina's attention. The two of them stared in amazement as Ichiri suddenly began withering like a yellow autumn leaf.

What happened? Yukina asked Shiko with her eyes. Shiko thought for a while, then quickly gave up. Still, she knew what she ought to do. She began watering Ichiri.

It worked. Ichiri came back to life, and her skin even became translucent.

She had been overwatered.

Shiko put down the watering can and continued the topic Ichiri had started. "Isn't Tokyo by the sea? You should have more chances to see the ocean."

Ichiri spoke softly. "I only went with my family when I was little."

"I suppose so. I only went when I was little too." Shiko nodded.

As Ichiri relaxed a little, her words became more natural. "Ah, I remember Shiko's home was by the river, in Hang..." She suddenly covered her mouth.

"Huh?" Shiko felt a chill run down her back. She had never mentioned what city she had lived in during her previous life. How did Ichiri know?

Ichiri seemed to give up on hiding it. Her face suddenly turned bright red. "It's just... before we crossed over, the dishes in Shiko's lunchbox were usually rather light, but West Lake Vinegar Fish was the only one with a strong flavor, so I... looked it up online a little... Then, combining that with what Shiko said recently about living by the river and the tide, as well as the tide heights that Shiko was familiar with, I thought I probably wasn't wrong..."

Shiko's face stiffened. What can I even say? Gravity is amazing... Clearly, the gravity around Ichiri in the original work hadn't reached this level... No, perhaps it had?

Still, she couldn't say anything. It would be bad if Ichiri started blaming herself.

"Ah... that's right. I lived there. Wow, speaking of it, I really do miss it~" She began describing the scenery of her hometown. As a shut-in, she didn't actually know much about the attractions back home.

"...West Lake Vinegar Fish is pretty famous, but I've never actually eaten it, so I don't know whether it's good. I heard it's terribly awful and is just used to scam outsiders..." As she spoke, she gradually became immersed in memories of her hometown. She hadn't known it while she was there, but only after leaving had she realized how precious every familiar plant and tree in her hometown was. Even when walking through an unfamiliar place, she felt more relaxed if she was in that city than anywhere else. After all, the patterns of the traffic lights and crosswalks on those streets were familiar.

Ichiri noticed the nostalgia on Shiko's face.

"Then, Shiko, have you ever thought about... going back?" she asked after Shiko had said nearly everything she wanted to say.

"Hm?"

"Going back to the kind of life you had before." She seemed frightened by her own question, and her voice grew quieter and quieter.

Shiko chuckled as if she had heard something amusing.

"Wanting to return to my hometown and wanting to return to the past are two completely different things."

She braced both hands behind herself. "I don't think I've ever told you about my past, have I?"

"Are you going to talk about it now?" Ichiri looked worriedly behind her. Yukina was still doing her own thing. She still didn't know about Shiko's identity or the fact that Shiko had crossed over twice.

"If necessary, I can leave." Yukina didn't turn around, but she seemed to have heard their conversation.

"It's fine," Shiko said. "How should I put it... if I miss my hometown, I can simply go back there once I return to reality. But apart from that, I don't miss a single thing."

Chapter Thirty-One: The Sound of Tides from the Past

"Child, you really have a talent for this." In my previous life, my piano teacher had said that. "It would be such a shame if you didn't pursue music... If you want to enter competitions, I can sign you up."

I was happy. It was the first time I had discovered that I was good at something. So I went home and told my parents to let me continue learning piano.

"How many times do we have to tell you? You're going into junior high. You won't have time to study it anymore." They had sounded extremely impatient.

"But I have talent..."

Mom had snorted. "Of course your teacher would say that! If you keep studying, he gets more money. Of course he'd say that!" My parents' words had sounded like absolute truth.

I had been furious. My teacher treated me well, and the books said that teachers were great. I absolutely didn't want anyone slandering my teacher, not even my parents. So the child I had been argued with my parents.

Naturally, nothing came of it. How could a sixth-grade child resist her parents? The piano at home had been sent to a relative's house. I heard that their child barely played it either, and a few years later that piano was sent away again, to somewhere unknown. I only learned that afterward. I had to study. I had drawn a spot at a key junior high school, which was incredible luck, so I had to cherish the opportunity, get into a key senior high school, and finally enter a key university. In the end, I would enter a major company like my brother, who was ten years older than me, and earn a million a year.

The road had already been laid out before I even knew what the future was.

"It's all for your own good."

I knew that my parents' educational paths had once contained many "if onlys."

One had graduated from a technical secondary school—a technical secondary school from decades ago. The other had graduated from a university that had been excellent at the time, but was now a completely worthless diploma mill.

"The cutoff score was enough back then..." Dad often lamented over dinner about missing the chance to attend that prestigious university. It was also the school he expected me to get into every day.

In junior high, I discovered that I was relatively good at the humanities. Compared with a pile of inexplicable formulas and symbols, long passages of text suited me better. Chemistry, one of the main subjects, was only average for me, but in social studies and geography, which were secondary subjects, I was always among the top students in my class.

Overall, however, I wasn't good at solving problems. In my final year of junior high, my scores could barely reach the cutoff for a key senior high school, putting me only in the upper-middle range at school. I had entered by lottery in the first place, and half the class had tested their way into the school. Among them were plenty of geniuses who could rank near the top without even trying. The most despairing thing wasn't that some people were born in Rome. It was that they started at the same place as you and competed fairly, yet were naturally faster than you.

Then I had to fight with everything I had. Looking back, I didn't even know why I had worked so hard, but all the propaganda and instruction around me had long told me to study hard and get into a good university. So I had felt, deep down, that I had to give it everything. Still, there had been one sincere reason I wanted to get good grades.

Some of the students who had entered by lottery like me were lazy and had terrible manners. Because I had no friends, they often bullied me. If I got into a good school, I should be able to escape people like them.

The state I had been in when I fought desperately still shocked me whenever I thought about it. Although I had appeared to live normally, all I thought about twenty-four hours a day was studying. I didn't waste any mental energy on anything else. Every day, I did an English test and a math test, then asked the teacher questions. I memorized every standard answer for Chinese reading comprehension and worked out the patterns. Physics and chemistry were the same. I never turned my face toward the window again. As for my phone... I had only gotten one in my final year of junior high, after my parents discarded it, and I had barely touched it.

In the final mock exams, my total score rose by more than ten points each time. Converted into rankings, that meant climbing dozens of places.

It was like a miracle.

The junior high school entrance exam results were announced.

"Ha! Ha!" Even I, who never showed my emotions, couldn't help laughing wildly. It was a score I had once never dared to imagine, the kind of score achieved by the top academic gods.

In the end, I entered the school ranked third in the entire city, one of the "Top Three," a prestigious school with over 120 years of history that had produced fifty-three academicians. My parents excitedly bragged to the other parents. I didn't know exactly who they were, though they were probably the parents of my classmates or something. I had almost completely forgotten my classmates' names after one summer, and they had probably forgotten mine too.

In high school, the proportion of humanities subjects in the curriculum increased. As always, I was terrible at chemistry. The humanities posed no problem, and biology was close enough to the humanities that I did fine there too. The strangest subject was physics. I couldn't solve the problems at all and could only blindly plug numbers into a few formulas, yet my scores were surprisingly decent. It was probably because nobody else knew how to do them either.