My Wife Is A Princess

"What are you thinking of, feeling everything is very fresh?"

"Hm."

"When did you come here?"

"This morning."

"How did you come?"

"There was a battle, lost control during the battle."

"Then how are you going back?"

"Save power, break through s.p.a.ce."

"Is it very difficult?"

"So-so."

There was much freshness and curiosities for Annan Xiu after coming to a strange world, but it was becoming increasingly harder for Li Luyou to suppress his desire to ask many questions after he’d accepted there was a princess from another world beside him.

Li Luyou’s questions flew nonstop and Annan Xiu barely tolerated them with great impatience, answering each of them with curt replies. It was like when relatives dropped by and came to send their greetings. Li Luyou decided enough was enough when he saw the little girl’s pretty eyebrows wrinkle up. He was clearly a mere aboriginal in her eyes, and she would naturally not have much interest in exchanging with him as an imperial princess whose world revolved around herself.

Annan Xiu said with a blank face when she saw Li Luyou’s embarra.s.sed expression, "I will try my best to answer your doubts. After all, I will also have many questions to ask of you."

"Ask then, I won’t hide anything I know."

Annan Xiu opened her mouth but didn’t immediately ask her question. How could she be the same as Li Luyou and act as if she hadn’t seen the world, chattering endlessly with trivial senseless questions. The questions she had to ask had to fit with her status, and also reflect her profundity.

After thinking a while, Annan Xiu raised a very serious question involving the social, ecological and cultural facets of scientific learning. "The people from this world aren’t plucked down from trees?"

"Nope." Li Luyou couldn’t help laughing. He couldn’t imagine the scene of little children hanging on a tree like fruits while waiting for someone to pluck them down and take them back. "A man and a woman combine together, then the woman becomes pregnant and will give birth to a child. Every one of us is born like that… Born from the belly of a woman."

Annan Xiu lowered her head and looked at her own belly, involuntarily rubbing it. Then she looked at the women walking by in the street, her face full of disbelief. "It’s truly a strange world, women replace the function of life trees… But then what use are men? Do you absolute need a man and a woman together to birth a child? Are males absolutely indispensable therein?"

"Of course, you need both a man and a woman. Only then can you complete the impregnation process. Afterwards the rest is left to the woman. That’s why mothers can often obtain more admiration in our world." Li Luyou hoped her line of question would stop there. He had no way of explaining the specifics of procreation to a girl not yet of age.

Li Luyou felt some curiosity when he saw the expression in Annan Xiu’s eyes. Since everyone on the Heavenly Clouds Divine Realm were picked from trees, then according to Darwin’s theory of evolution, their reproductive ability would have degraded even if they had it to begin with. Or perhaps they never had those organs and functions from the very start.

Li Luyou felt uncomfortable and awkward just thinking about it. He couldn’t help asking, "Are you all as.e.xual?"

"As.e.xual?" Annan Xiu looked at Li Luyou with a frown.

"That is you don’t have genders, no distinction between men and women… Fruits are all fruits, there’s no distinction of male or female."

Annan Xiu’s cheeks reddened somewhat under the veil of the night. She waited for Li Luyou to finish with raised eyebrows. "Of course not, we distinguish between men and women all the same. Why do you ask this?"

"I just feel it hard to understand."

"You’re an idiot, what’s hard to understand." Annan Xiu twisted her head back. It was fortunate he hadn’t asked her too excessively to prove she was a girl. Annan Xiu understood very clearly the differences between men and women as an erudite and multi-talented divine sorceress. It was just beneath her contempt to care about those things.

Li Luyou also felt it was fortunate she wasn’t any kind of strange creature but rather a normal girl. Li Luyou wasn’t very keen on living together with genderless, inters.e.xual, or hermaphrodite strange creatures… But anyway, it seemed even more idiotic to ask questions like whether people were plucked down from trees or not.

Li Luyou led Annan Xiu to the supermarket. Annan Xiu had already changed into a comparatively simpler dress, but such a pretty little girl was still very eye-catching. Li Luyou saw those guys holding their phones and pretending to type on their keyboard, so he could only hurry to buy the daily supplies and rush to take her back.

Annan Xiu was a little unhappy, because she’d seen a woman buying a pack of something in front of a shelf just now. Annan Xiu had merely sent a curious glance her way, but that woman had actually told her with quite some disdain, "You don’t need that yet? Little brat."

Li Luyou was actually worried about this issue, but it wasn’t suitable for him to talk about it with Annan Xiu. Moreover, he had some suspicions Annan Xiu was possible unable to give birth unlike women from Earth. Those things would certainly not happen if so.

And thus did senior princess Annan Xiu of the Annan imperial house from the Heavenly Clouds Divine Realm settle down in this small neighborhood from the nineties. She didn’t bring much changes or troubles to Li Luyou’s life. He’d hurried to cla.s.s for the start of the new term just the next day.

The old men and old ladies that were originally still earnestly worried whether the little girl had found her parents had already figured out that she was an orphan after a week had gone by. She didn’t want to go to places like orphanages and temporarily borrowed Li Luyou’s place to live. Seeing that the little girl was able to act independently every day, seemingly not under the threat or compulsion of bad guys, no one went to meddle and contact the neighborhood committee or the local police station or whatever.

They took pity on this little girl. Some also bought their children’s old clothes, even those of male children. Li Luyou accepted them all without exception, but he didn’t tell Annan Xiu. This Imperial Highness wouldn’t think they were acting out of good intentions, she would only think they were provoking her princess dignity.

Annan Xiu hence settled in quietly like that. She didn’t seem on planning to trouble Li Luyou too much. He went out early every day and came back late. Annan Xiu didn’t require too much care from him either other than making breakfast and preparing dinner. She stayed alone at home the vast majority of time. Sometimes she would go on a stroll in the small neighborhood by herself, sit in the small pavilion and watch the dome of the sky above her head, or stand beside the pond and watch the great red carps swim hither and fro, or maybe she would wave her two little slender legs and sway back and forth on a swing.

Annan Xiu wasn’t like those ancient people in soap operas who came to the modern era and couldn’t understand a thing, making a fuss about nothing and becoming a laughingstock. She was particularly quiet, her ability to accept and learn particularly strong. In a few days’ time she’d already mastered the use of house appliances like the washing machine or the electric stove. Now and again she would watch a show on TV. Once, Li Luyou had kicked the fridge’s electric cable off, and Annan Xiu had gone to plug it back inside the socket. She’d warned Li Luyou afterwards that popsicles were things she still relatively liked to eat, and the popsicles would melt if the electricity was cut off.

Li Luyou wouldn’t remember her status of a princess of the Annan imperial house at all time. He had a little the same feeling he had back when he lived together with his younger sister. But he would also occasionally see Annan Xiu reading newspapers, and she also began to devote herself to those books Li Luyou had bought, what "History of the Peloponnesian War," "War and Civilization of Mesopotamia," "War of Independence," and so on, making Li Luyou secretly scared. Could it be that the great demon king hadn’t yet given up on the idea of summoning an unstoppable invasion army?

Raising a pretty little girl at home didn’t bring too many disturbances. It was just that he had to shoulder the responsibilities of cleaning and washing clothes. Gone were the bright former days when he could throw his dirty clothes into a pile and wait for his sister to come wash them on the weekends. Li Luyou could only use the excuse that his sister was in her last year of high school and shouldn’t delay her studies by running back and forth to prevent his younger sister from discovering Annan Xiu’s existence.

She would be discovered sooner or later though. Li Luyou hadn’t decided how to explain yet… The other trouble was that the cost of living had become a little harder to bear with two persons under the same roof. After working summer jobs and managing his household, there were still only a few bills left inside his wallet after buying a few sets of clothes for Annan Xiu.

Annan Xiu didn’t require her bag to be always filled with pocket money like normal young female students, but Li Luyou still left her a couple bills to let her try to partic.i.p.ate in this world’s economic activities. Not to mention; this was a world where not having money in your bag equaled to not having any sense of security.

He quickly discovered that Annan Xiu wasn’t suitable to partic.i.p.ate in this world’s economic activities however. He unexpectedly saw Annan Xiu in a small shop at the corner of the streets that day when he had walked out of the bookstore after buying a set of College English Test level 61 teaching and exercise materials, ready to go home. He hadn’t expected her to have extended her range of activities so far already, since that place was more than ten miles away from the small neighborhood. The Annan Xiu who was extremely disgusted with public buses and didn’t know how to use taxis had actually managed to dawdle such a long distance on her pair of tender and n.o.ble feet. It was really out of Li Luyou’s expectations.

Annan Xiu was in the middle of buying popsicles. The ones she bought were those white sugar popsicles at fifty cents a pop. From what Li Luyou could tell, the only thing Annan Xiu liked to eat was precisely those white sugar popsicles. She didn’t care so much about her princess status anymore when she started to like those kinds of things, and didn’t care much either about how the not so graceful manners of sucking on a popsicle would be really harmful to the bearing and posture she ought to maintain.

Li Luyou would often see her stroll around the small neighborhood while licking a popsicle. Only, she’d stop licking it when she saw Li Luyou, and she would wait for Li Luyou to walk away before hiding somewhere and secretly eating it. Li Luyou would occasionally peek on her; she would unexpectedly expose an expression of pleasurable enjoyment.

Were popsicles so delicious? Li Luyou had trouble understanding, but a little girl was after all a little girl, even if a princess… Only a little girl would love to eat popsicles. Most of the girls the same age as Li Luyou were very fond of or yearned for Häagen-Dazs, and they would show absolute contempt for white sugar popsicles worth fifty cents.

You could only make a profit of ten or twenty cents on a fifty cents popsicles, but what Annan Xiu took out was a hundred yuan bill. The shopkeeper was a little unhappy and asked Annan Xiu if she had some loose change.

"What’s change?" Annan Xiu took out another one hundred yuan bill while sucking on a popsicle. "Is this one ok?"

"Do you have problems, I’m talking about change!" The shopkeeper looked at Annan Xiu with eyes that said idiot.