Li Xingfang had stayed behind on Klusano. I didn't know whether he wanted to reassure his family and friends back home that he was safe, or simply wanted to keep a record, but he had been updating his social media accounts often lately.
The new posts were photos he'd taken while diving.
He had only just started learning to dive and couldn't stay underwater for long.
The azure sea, sunlight streaming through the surface. Such beautiful scenery didn't need much photographic skill to do it justice.
His earlier posts had been about Klusano Island.
The island now belonged to Country A, but it was far from the mainland. The indigenous people's history on the island stretched back much further than Country A's own. Now it had become a tourist island through and through. Tourism was its only industry; it had no other economic pillars, no light or heavy industry, and not even a university of its own. Its basic education consisted of a single school combining primary and secondary education. The people there weren't very enthusiastic about studying, either. They were satisfied with knowing an international language and enough arithmetic to calculate the admission fees they were owed.
Li Xingfang had stayed there for a while and learned the basics of the local indigenous language. The language itself was simple, with a limited vocabulary and no grammar to speak of. After people from Country A set foot on the island, its civilization stopped developing, and its language naturally remained primitive. Before the people from Country A arrived, the indigenous people there had no concept of civilization, either. They couldn't even explain how their ancestors had reached the isolated island in the middle of the sea. Experts in anthropology, however, had studied the matter.
The local word Li Xingfang focused on