Chapter 218: Imperial Capital Accent? [Part 2]
The scene before Cillin reminded him of his old room at Planet Brown Earth.
It was a very simple and crude room. The word ‘wretched’ might even fit this place.
A worn out robot with exposed circuits sat quietly at the corner. Judging from the coat of dust that was covering its body, it had probably been there for a very long time.
Cillin tried moving his fingers. So far so good.
Trying to sit up cost Cillin a huge amount of energy and pain, however. Every muscle in his body felt like they were branded by hot iron. He never had the time to recover from the terrible wounds inflicted by Oskulos before he was thrown into a painful trip inside the time vortex. The double injuries hurt Cillin so much that he gasped once for air.
A while later, he finally came to and exhaled. Then, he saw the gray cat clinging to his arm like an octopus.
The gray cat wasn’t moving though. In fact, it was completely stiff and not breathing.
Cillin could feel the life inside the gray cat even though it had no heartbeat or breathing. It was still alive.
Cillin flicked the gray cat’s ears.
No reaction.
He poked its stomach once.
Still no reaction.
Cillin frowned. Did it experience a system crash or something?
Cillin was still wearing the same clothes as he did before, but his protective suit was hung on a nearby hanger. The suit looked tattered and worn.
Cillin suddenly noticed something and turned around to look. The peepers shrank back into their hiding spots, but not for long.
One head, two heads, three heads.
Three little kids who looked very similar to each other poked out from behind the door and stared at him with great curiosity. They looked like they wanted to come over, but were too afraid to do so.
They were kids alright. Every piece of their emotions were reflected directly on their faces.
Cillin shot them a smile, but said nothing to them. He wasn’t sure what kind of situation he was in right now, and he didn’t want to say something wrong due to his ignorance. A smile was enough to express goodwill, not to mention that many kids get encouraged by smiles.
Seeing Cillin’s smile, the three kids were given just enough encouragement to return their own.
The fact that the room was a little shabby proved that the master of this place wasn’t financially sound, but all three kids had chubby cheeks and displayed no signs of undernourishment whatsoever. This showed that the master of this place valued his children’s growth a lot.
One of the children withdrew out of view and ran away, shouting something while doing so. Cillin couldn’t understand him.
He was definitely in a strange place alright. He knew every Sector language that existed in all GAL regions, but the one used by the kid was completely unfamiliar to him.
One of the two remaining kids was a little bolder than the other. He slowly walked over and leaned against the bed, looking at Cillin and saying something. Unfortunately, Cillin still couldn’t understand him.
The kid tried again, and Cillin made a puzzled expression to express his inability to understand his words. But he was just a kid, so he didn’t realize that Cillin couldn’t understand his words. He even turned around to speak a few lines with the other kid who was still looking around from behind the door.
Footsteps rang from outside the door while the two kids were speaking. He knew immediately that it belonged to an adult.
The kid who ran away earlier dragged an elderly person wearing a kind smile on his face into the room. He was old and slightly hunchbacked, but he was also pretty healthy and in high spirits. His hands looked very rough and was covered in callus.
He said something to Cillin after seeing that he had sat up, and Cillin returned him a puzzled look to indicate his inability to understand their words.
By now the remaining two kids had pounced towards the old man too and said a lot of things that Cillin didn’t understand while pointing at him.
Old Chang was fixing some machines before his grandson ran over. He told him that the person they brought home had already woken up, and that he was smiling at the three of them. Therefore, Old Chang put down his work temporarily and allowed his grandson to pull him to Cillin’s room by the finger.
It was the triplets’ birthday, and Old Chang had once promised his kids that he would take them around the planet during their birthday. Therefore, he did just that and took them on a twirl around the planet on his shabby little s.p.a.ceplane a few days ago.
However, people of their circ.u.mstances had no right to talk about piloting quality s.p.a.ceplanes, or conducting long-range or warp travel. This was because they couldn’t afford even the energy needed to fly the s.p.a.ceplane. It was impressive already that a family like theirs was able to keep up with the maintenance fee of even a shabby s.p.a.ceplane, which was why their trip was possible only because Old Chang had spent many years acc.u.mulating the funds to do so. Moreover, their s.p.a.ceplane was so terrible that they couldn’t stray far away from the planet at all. The so-called s.p.a.ceflight was really just s.p.a.ceflight in name. If his grandson didn’t have sharp eyes, he would’ve missed the stranded person floating in s.p.a.ce.
Since Cillin was wearing a protective suit at the time, Old Chang automatically a.s.sumed that he was a s.p.a.ce engineer. s.p.a.ce missions were very dangerous, and one tiny misstep could result in being tossed into s.p.a.ce and left for dead. Old Chang had heard a lot of cases like this in his life. He knew that a lot of s.p.a.ce engineers had perished in s.p.a.ce like this. Wealthy people would just use maintenance robots for such tasks, but the not wealthy could neither afford nor risk purchasing cheap maintenance robots for the tasks they demanded of them. Therefore, they had no choice but to employ s.p.a.ce engineers to perform them.
Money of this kind was earned by literally putting lives at stake. It was work that Old Chang himself used to do when he was younger. But age was coming down on him, and he had a bunch of kids waiting for him back home everyday. Therefore, he no longer took on such jobs and focused solely on his current work.
Old Chang sighed when he saw the gray cat wrapped tightly around Cillin’s arm. It was rare to find an animal as loyal as this, but nothing could change the fact that the gray cat was already stiff by the time they found Cillin. This meant that the gray cat had died for quite some time already.
If the gray cat knew of Old Chang’s thoughts, it absolutely would have puffed up in anger.
Old Chang had never seen the kind of protective suit Cillin was wearing before. Maybe he wasn’t a resident of their planet? But despite this, Old Chang was a former worker in the s.p.a.ce maintenance field. The fact that Cillin worked in the same field as him gave him a good first impression immediately, and Cillin’s age only tugged at his sympathy even more. He couldn’t imagine that a lad this young would go so far as to accept a dangerous job like this. If they hadn’t ran into him by accident, or if his protective suit was damaged before they met him, the boy would’ve been dead by now.
Cillin’s protective suit was cut open after Old Chang had saved him from s.p.a.ce. They couldn’t have provided him with medical aid or even feed him pills otherwise.
His grandsons told him that the lad was a little stupid, but Old Chang thought that maybe he just couldn’t understand their language. A moment later, Old Chang switched languages and tried to speak a somewhat shoddy version of the imperial language with a heavy accent. It was also the empire’s lingua franca.
“Do you understand this?”
Cillin did, and it shocked him greatly. The language he spoke was very similar to the one Genya had taught him when he was younger. Genya told him that it was his native language, but Cillin never found any traces of it in GAL. He didn’t think that he’d be able to hear it at this place.
Cillin said tentatively, “I can. I can understand this language somewhat.”
Old Chang’s eyes lit up when he heard this, “Ah, you’re from the imperial capital star region!”
Cillin scratched his head embarra.s.sedly. The truth was he had no idea what the heck ‘imperial capital star region’ meant.
Sensing no denial of his claim from Cillin, Old Chang a.s.sumed that he was a child born in the imperial capital star region who was forced to perform a dangerous task like s.p.a.ce maintenance because of his poor family conditions.
Generally speaking, only those who lived in the imperial capital star region could intonate the language with no accent at all. Old Chang knew very few foreigner to the imperial capital star region who could do the same since it was very difficult to feign. At the very least, Old Chang never heard of anyone who could speak such perfect imperial language unless it came from media broadcast.
“Are you a mechanical engineer?”
“I guess I am.”
Old Chang showered Cillin with a look of pity. Deriving a living in the capital wasn’t easy; the lad must have had no other choice when he came to a shabby place like theirs. Sigh, what a pitiable child.
Cillin continued to maintain a perfect smile on his face, but his mouth couldn’t stop twitching when he saw the one third tenderly and two thirds affectionate look on Old Chang’s face.
“I am Chang. Just call me grandpa Chang like the kids do,” Old Chang pa.s.sed over a cup of water and a couple of pills to Cillin.
Cillin swallowed the pills immediately upon accepting. He then thanked Old Chang for his kindness.
Old Chang smiled happily seeing that Cillin had swallowed the pills he gave without any hesitation at all. If Cillin was anyone else, they would’ve doubted the pills’ authenticity and a.n.a.lysed them for half a day.
Old Chang had no idea that Cillin had figured out the pills’ composition the moment he accepted them. The only reason he ate the pills without hesitation was because they were just basic supplements. G.o.d knows if Old Chang’s heart would shatter if he knew about the truth.
“I am Cillin.”
Cillin didn’t say much about himself. He only said that he was currently alone.
Old Chang chatted with Cillin for a moment, allowing Cillin to know a simple outline of their family circ.u.mstances.
The three kids Cillin saw earlier were five years old triplets. They were the sixth, seventh and eighth children of the family, so Old Chang called them Six, Seven and Eight directly. They had no other names.
The town they were in had bad standard of living. The survival rate of children in each family was terribly low, so everyone tried to give birth to as many children as they could. The children’s high mortality rate was also the reason why they weren’t given official names. They would only be given good sounding names if they grew to adulthood or encountered some special circ.u.mstances.
Old Chang’s partner pa.s.sed away early, and the one capable son he had had pa.s.sed away too because of an accident. His daughter-in-law did her d.a.m.ndest to give birth to as many children as possible while her husband was around, but she too wasted away after his son’s pa.s.sing. She went after her husband after she gave birth to the triplets, leaving behind six children to Old Chang.
Why just six? That was because the eldest and the second child didn’t survive.
Thankfully, the eleven years old twins Chang Three and Chang Four didn’t fail to live up to expectations. They studied hard enough to enroll themselves into a prestigious school, and the reason they weren’t around was because they had left this region to study abroad.
Chang Five’s life was riddled with difficulties since the day he was conceived in his mother’s womb, so he was born with a poor const.i.tution that was p.r.o.ne to illness. He was a pitiable child who was born to medicine his whole life.
Right now, Old Chang works in his own small repair shop and earns a basic living fee for himself and the kids everyday. Almost every family in this particular region of the planet was also doing the same thing; opening a small repair shop of their own to feed themselves.