Who touch my tails?!!

7.1 - It did not mean that he was making way for the protagonist shou

translator: xiin

editors: alamerysl & BlueBug

After getting the results that she wanted, the madame spoke for a while with Xue Ling and left. Xue Ling sat in his seat, stared at the dessert in front of him, and spaced out.

He had been accompanied by a little girl, who was now clinging to his hand as she expressed her disagreement with his actions, "Young Master, how could you have agreed to Madame Lou's request? She has never liked the Young Master, and ever since Young Master had desperately insisted on having the Lou family agree to an engagement with you, she has always disliked you the most. You've finally gotten the engagement you insisted on, so why are you now changing your mind again?"

Xue Ling's head hurt from all her noise. He pushed the dessert on the table forward and said, "Sit there and eat. Let the food occupy your mouth!"

The little girl pouted aggrievedly, her large eyes rolling a little. Seeing that Xue Ling had closed his eyes with an ugly expression on his face, she finally obediently sat down to eat.

The young master seemed truly angry. At the end of the day, he had just been disdained by his future mother-in-law, and even agreed to dissolve the hard-won marriage contract - he must be really sad.

In fact, Xue Ling was currently discussing the problem of his characters' genders in every world with the system, but the system came across as particularly innocent. "This identity that the host has been given is extremely well-suited to interfering with the two protagonists as it is closely related to their identities. I only chose it because I felt like it's really not bad at all. I even opened a big golden finger for my host~"

Xue Ling rolled his eyes, too lazy to pay attention to his own system. "Send the story over." He would beat the system to death after he finished reading up on the plot.

He also had no idea if the marriage contract that he had just eagerly agreed to dissolve would affect his ability to complete his tasks in this world.

This world's settings was not very different from the standard ABO settings. Well, in Xue Ling's opinion, any settings where there was a third gender or factors that allowed men to have children outside of science were all similar to ABO.

But, since he was incapable of giving birth, he was indifferent to the fundamental settings of this world.

The genders in this world were not as vague as those in ABO worlds. There were basically just men and women, only a certain proportion of them would become merfolk. And yes, merfolk were able to give birth the next generation of merfolk for humans.

There was a distinction between natural merfolk and artificial ones in this world. Natural mermaids or mermen were people like Xue Ling's current body - they were bred by merfolk and hatched from eggs, and when they were 'born', they came out as small eggs. Artificial merfolk were ones who had relied on 'science and technology' to transform human legs into a fishtail. The two different methods for creating a mermaid affected the resulting mermaid's breeding value.

That's right. Although there were women in this world, over the passage of time, they had already lost the ability to reproduce. Only by transforming into merfolk could human beings reproduce 'naturally'.

It was because of this addition gender that the world was also divided into three types: ordinary people, breeders and merfolk. Not everyone could get a merperson pregnant, and ordinary people may never come into contact with a mermaid or merman in their entire lives. Rather, the only ones who could get merfolk pregnant were the 'breeders' who had extraordinary talents. The numbers of these three types of people could be explained with this ratio: the population of breeders was half the size of the ordinary population, while the number of artificial and natural merfolk combined was half the number of breeders.

Calculated this way, merfolk were definitely precious, and it was no wonder that the madame had been so careful when asking him to break off the engagement.

The original owner of this body was named Yan Qiwen. He was the adopted son of the Duke's Palace, and was a little merman young master that grew up refined and trained in the classics. He had been brought up sheltered in a boudoir and had no knowledge of the world. He saw the protagonist gong Lou Cen for the first time during the banquet held for his eighteenth birthday, which was the beginning of a mistake that lasted a lifetime.

He was a cannon fodder character who couldn't possibly be more like a cannon fodder. The reason why the system would say that this identity was especially well suited to interact with the protagonist gong and shou was very simple: it was because the original body owner was the key person who triggered the main plotline of the story.

The Duchess had laid a mermaid egg eighteen years ago, and she loved her youngest son more than her life. However, the mermaid egg was stolen during a trip to the sea. The Duke assigned a lot of manpower to search for it, but could not find even a trace of their family's little young master. Instead, they found and picked up another mermaid egg that was on the verge of death from the beach.

The Duchess who had just lost her youngest son took in this mermaid egg as her spiritual replacement and sentimentally cared for it. Five months later, the egg hatched a little merchild with a black and gold tail. The little merchild was given the name Yan Qiwen, and became the youngest son of the Duke's Palace.

Despite having a spiritual replacement, the Duchess was still hopeful about finding her own son. And the little mermaid egg that had disappeared at the seaside, naturally, this little merchild was precisely the protagonist shou.

Yan Qiwen had reached eighteen years of age, but he was still naïve, sheltered, and ignorant. During the dinner banquet that the Duke's Palace hosted for his eighteenth birthday, he fell in love with Lou Cen, the protagonist gong, at first sight, crying and making a fuss that he would never marry if it was anyone other than him.

Lou Cen was a soldier who had accomplished much in recent years. He had constantly been striving hard for his career, and was both upright and serious. He did not want to start a family now, nor did he want to marry a merman who had only just reached adulthood, as it would completely slow him down. Only, the Duke's Palace was powerful, and because the Duchess truly had no way to hold up against the crying and wailing of the little merchild that she had carefully looked after from birth, she could only entreat the Duke to find a way to ensure that the two would get married.

Unfortunately, Lou Cen fell into a coma because of an accident during his recent mission even before the engagement ceremony could be held. The hospital confirmed that it was possible that he might not wake up from his coma at all. Or, he might survive this crisis and become a SSS level breeder. If he woke up, then the officers would be welcoming another into their ranks, becoming a general would not be a problem, and even becoming a marshal would not be nothing but a dream. Of course, the premise was that he needed to wake up.

The original host of this body was not worried that his sweetheart would not survive, so he had flatly refused when Madame Lou asked him to dissolve his engagement. However, Madame Lou was not satisfied with the original body's owner as he was too naïve and easy to cheat. In Madame Lou's heart, marrying such a person would not be helpful to her son at all, let alone that she privately had a close relationship with the protagonist shou, and had always wanted the protagonist shou to become her daughter-in-law. So, she was very diligent in inviting the original to come out and talk.

The accident also occurred during such an invitation. The original body's owner had always pushed to see Lou Cen, wanting stay by his side to accompany him, but Madame Lou had always used all kinds of reasons and excuses to influence the original's crush on Lou Cen. The repeated refusals made the original realize that Madame Lou was unhappy with him, and during one such instance, he could no longer tolerate Madame Lou's coldness and neglect towards him. He left without his bodyguards, and was thus kidnapped.

The original owner had a very magical body. He could transform his tail into human legs at will, but because he was raised as a merperson from an early age, the original body's owner did not regard this as a talent. Rather, he felt that he was a terrible monster and not a good merperson at all, because a good merperson would never have a pair of legs. So, he had always kept silent on this point, and no one else, not even the Duchess who loved him so much knew about this. And he had been kidnapped exactly because of that little secret.

His kidnappers belonged to an underground merfolk research laboratory. They studied the history of merfolk, wanting to know the origin of merfolk and whether or not there was any way to create more merfolk and make human society more prosperous without having to spend so much effort and work so hard to reproduce.

Eighteen years ago, the merfolk research laboratory discovered deep-sea merfolk. They stole an egg from those deep-sea merfolk that did not ever come ashore. But due to unexpected circumstances, in order to escape the deep-sea merfolk's pursuit, they hid the egg on the beach. And then… the Duchess who had been looking for her son dug it up.

This egg was Yan Qiwen.

The merflk laboratory spent more than ten years trying to find him. They planned and nurtured schemes ceaselessly in order to kidnap him, and they had Madame Lou to thank for creating an opportunity for them and allowing them to acquire their desired research target so smoothly.

The plot could be considered to have completely unfolded after that. Yan Qiwen disappeared, Madame Lou was questioned by the duke, the protagonist gong woke up, the protagonist shou mixed into this mess, and the story really began, but Yan Qiwen already had no part to play.

Needless to say, after a long period of time, the protagonist gong finally destroyed the merflk laboratory and discovered news of Yan Qiwen who had committed suicide because he had been unable to bear the suffering. He was remembered and mourned, which could be considered as a kind of drama.

He could be regarded as the starting point of the whole plot. His kidnapping helped the protagonist gong and shou meet each other, and allowed the Duchess to find her own son. His death also agitated the entire ocean population, causing the deep-sea mermaids and humans to erupt into intense conflict and strife. The war gave the protagonist gong opportunities to rise up in the ranks and increase his income, reaching the peak of his life, and allowed the 'Holy Mary' shou to shine even brighter as the shou turned on his golden finger abilities and finally resolved the contradictions between the two races.

Living in glory, and dying in greatness.

Xue Ling finished going through the plot and sighed.

"Did this little merchild have any unfulfilled wishes?" Xue Ling asked the system. After reading the information, he had to agree that there were benefits to this identity. First of all, he could turn this annoying fishtail into a pair of legs; second, this identity had the lineage of the deep-sea merfolk's royal family. Becoming successful was simply a matter of minutes as his own body was the biggest trump card. Coupled with the fact that deep-sea merfolk and the natural merfolk had completely different body structures, his body was not nearly as weak and frail as it looked. This would make it much easier for him to deal with matters.

"He died too painfully. He was tortured over and over again. He could not beg for life, nor was he allowed death; he only wanted to completely destroy the mermaid laboratory."

Xue Ling raised his eyebrows. This was slightly more interesting, and it even involved taking the plot away from the protagonist, which coincided with his task to change the protagonists' fate. "He didn't want to be with Lou Cen and grow old together?"

"He had a kind of idol worship towards Lou Cen. You can open your nano-computer to check - Lou Cen had a large number of fans on the mermaid network, and he could be counted as one of those brain-impaired fans. Before he died, he had always hoped that Lou Cen would come and save him, but after the people in the laboratory showed him news of Lou Cen's engagement to the protagonist shou, he completely lost hope, which was probably one of the reasons for his suicide."

"His own ex-fiance announced an engagement to another man less than two months after his disappearance, and that other man was the true son of the Duke's Palace. All the information he had received from childhood to adulthood was completely overturned. It is normal that he suddenly lost his ** to survive, leaving only his extreme hatred for the research institute."

Xue Ling rubbed his chin and lowered his gaze as a slow smile emerged on his lips.

He approximately knew how long it would be before Lou Cen woke up. After he woke up, he would be the Empire's only SSS-class powerhouse, an absolute bug.

But, that had nothing to do with Xue Ling. After all, when he woke up, he would discover that Xue Ling had already broken off their engagement, and he didn't even have to think to know that Madame Lou would purposely slander him in front of Lou Cen. At that time, his relationship with Lou Cen would become particularly awkward, and the protagonist shou would come on stage like the tide and build up goodwill with Lou Cen.

Xue Ling never looked back with regret on the things he had already done, so he had no intention of going back on his word and reversing the broken engagement. However, breaking off the engagement did not mean that he was making way for the protagonist shou.

The protagonist shou grew up by the sea. He had been adopted by a peasant who fished for a living, and was accompanied by the sea every day. He met a deep-sea mermaid, which was what allowed him to act as a go-between for the deep-sea mermaids and human beings later on the story.

This year was the protagonist shou's eighteenth birthday and he was sent to the Empire's Capital to learn skills that all mermaids needed to have. Although he had come from a peasant family, he had the protagonist's halo, and the protagonist shou's treatment was exactly the same as that of aristocrats.

As a natural mermaid, he never had to worry about his life and future. His talent in design was outstanding, and he became good friends with a teacher in the mermaid school. Through the teacher, he came into contact with Madame Lou, and began to have dealings with her, designing dresses and fishtail skirts specially for her. Madame Lou was very fond of him and wanted to introduce this lovely child to her son.

But Yan Qiwen was wedged between them, and knowing that her son had no interest in him, Madame Lou dared to ask Yan Qiwen to terminate the marriage contract during her son's coma, taking advantage of the fact that Yan Qiwen was young and ignorant.

After approximately thinking through the plot's direction, Xue Ling intended to first penetrate the enemy's side first and develop a good relationship with the protagonist shou. It would be best if he could get him to be recognized and accepted into the Duke's Palace right away as it would make it more convenient for him to do things afterwards.

After all, Xue Ling believed that the Duchess would not allow her just-returned child to marry a comatose, vegetable man who had been rejected by her adopted son, even if he woke up as an SSS-class powerhouse.

'Breeders' are basically the 'alphas' of an ABO world, mermaids/mermen are the 'omegas' and the normal people are the 'beta' equivalent. The author lied, this setting is even more complicated than the standard ABO setting.

Also, i'm having a lot of trouble with the word 'merperson' … it sounds so strange o.o but 'mermaid' also seems wrong since XL and the MC are both male… we'll see how it goes~