Whale Song and Starlight

When Arthur was six, he placed a white seashell in her palm.

“My name is Arthur. I’m your brother.”

When she transmigrated into DoDoMo, she had no idea that over the century to come, the word “brother” would become the most suggestive title in the world.

A very talkative System appeared in her mind. It was called Xiao Bei. On its very first day, Xiao Bei helpfully reminded her, “Host, you and Arthur aren’t related by blood. You can legally be together in the future.”

“…He’s only six!” she roared inside her head.

She had planned to quietly wait for the story to finish, then find a way home. But on the night her clan was wiped out, Arthur took her hand and ran through the flames. When his inheritance was contested, she took an assassin’s hidden arrow for him and found an antidote to a deadly poison. Beneath the deep sea, he pressed the last seashell into her palm. “I picked you up, so you have to stay with me forever.”

Then stay with him she would.

From the Aegean Sea to Atlantis, from childhood to a century of immortality. Everyone said the King of the Atlantic, a gentle and distant man, never let anyone close. Only she knew that the golden-haired, blue-eyed man would braid her hair late at night, each strand with more patience than a siren’s song.

When someone asked who she was, Arthur smiled. “My sister.”

Until one late night, he gently unraveled the braid she had made, running his fingers over the ends of her hair. His voice was as low as the receding tide.

“Lina, you know perfectly well that you’ve never been just my sister.”

Arthur had never been any less possessive than she was.

Whale song drifted up from the deep, and starlight fell across the Aegean Sea. The longest thing in the world isn’t immortality, but every century spent with you.