Ultraman Legend of the Light Chaser

The white frost spread rapidly, soon covering every one of His scales, and Pito finally froze at the moment of His escape.

Kinoshita Kei laughed heartlessly: "If you stretch any straighter, it'll look like a picture of stargazing."

He had just finished laughing when he inhaled a large breath of cold air, his mouth closing with half a mouthful of ice crystals. He bent over in agony, as if he had swallowed half a fly: "You attempted murder! This is creating a cosmic lawsuit!"

"I will end it when you can't hold on any longer."

“This isn’t about speed, I’ll start now…”

"Thump!" A hard human figure was imprinted on the snow. Following the salted fish, another ice sculpture appeared in the narrow space.

……

"Achoo!" Kinoshita Kei huddled under the blanket, shivering.

"Die!" The salted fish flicked its tail, vowing to never forgive those who froze Uranus: "Manly work, manly work!"

Aiba Yu grabbed its tail, and the salted fish wriggled and struggled in his hand, cursing incessantly: "This is the only one with such a high compatibility with Uranus! If I freeze you into ice crystals, I won't find another one!"

"I want to inspire..."

"You're kidding me!" Pito wanted to spit in his face, but he was more worried about Kinoshita Kei's condition: "Kei? My dear Kei? Should we see a doctor?"

"Huh?" Kinoshita Kei looked up. The voice of the Salted Fish King still sounded like gibberish, but he suddenly felt that the Salted Fish King was calling him.

"He asked you if you wanted to go to the hospital," Aiba Yu relayed dryly.

"I'm alright," Kinoshita Kei said, reaching out from under the covers to rub his face as he regained consciousness. "The temperature is warm. I just shivered and got warm enough to recover. You don't know, the real cold is in the south. This place is like a freezer. At least you can pull me out... In the past, winters were truly 'nowhere to escape' for me. There was no heating, and my nose would freeze when I breathed."

Aiba Yu thought he

Talking about winter in southern Japan, Kinoshita Kei continued, "It's so much better here, with hot springs and kotatsu (heated tables), much better than..."

He suddenly stopped talking.

Chapter Fifteen Mu Xiajing

“We have hot springs and kotatsu, what’s there to compare?” Pito bounced over, while Kinoshita Kei’s eyes darted around.

"It's much better than when I was a kid!" Kinoshita Kei pulled at the blanket. He saw his collection of "wives" and suddenly had an inspiration: "My grandma adopted me. It was hard for her to run a coffee shop by herself. My family was relatively poor when I was a kid. We couldn't afford to use the heating. Later, we researched new coffee products, and the shop gradually became well-known in the city. Life got better, and we could run the underfloor heating all winter without feeling bad."

"Waaah..." Pito jumped off the bed on his own and cried on the floor: "Yes, back then I was looking everywhere for humans who could coexist with Uranus. When I found you, you were just a newborn baby. Kinoshita Maho took you home from the street and used the coffee shop's operating costs to pay for your baby formula. I watched you struggle to make ends meet but I was powerless to help. Waaah—I'm such a bad ball!"

The salted fish rolled on the ground in self-reproach, but the person in question was startled by its reaction: "Brother Shadow, Brother Aiba, what's wrong with the Salted Fish King again?"

“He recalled your difficult life.” Aiba Yu silently shifted her position, trying to stay away from the splashes of water from the salted fish.

"Why are you crying when I'm struggling financially?" Kinoshita Kei reached for two tissues on the bedside table, but compared to the tears of a lazy bum, he felt they wouldn't be enough to wipe away. So he hesitated and fixed his gaze on the rag: "The floor will be ruined if it keeps getting wet. If you can't stop crying, why don't you go cry on the balcony?"

The salted fish sobbed and actually jumped onto the balcony, leaving a rough trail of water in its wake.

Kinoshita Kei felt sorry for Him, so he threw off the covers, got out of bed, picked Him up, and carried Him to the sunny balcony. His legs, no longer frozen solid, were fine except for a slight numbness. The little fish rolled happily in his arms: "Mousar, look! My sweet little Kei cares about Father Earth!"

Kinoshita Kei couldn't understand His emotion, only vaguely hearing the words "Kei-chan". He guessed that the salted fish might be expressing gratitude, and immediately laughed: "You said that my main body doesn't think much of it, just mentioned it casually, but you started crying first. Your empathy is too strong. Salted Fish King, are you female?"

“@＃￥＃￥……!” (Female or male, whatever makes you happy, Xiao Jing!)

"We don't speak the same language, I can only understand you calling me."

Kinoshita Kei sat down on the balcony with Pito in his arms. Pito's big, salty eyes were no longer watery. He found a dry towel and wiped Pito clean.

As Aiba Yu walked to his room door, he watched Kinoshita Kei carry Pito away. Suddenly, a silver light ignited in his eyes. From the Kinoshita family residence to the coffee shop downstairs, everything in his eyes turned into a semi-transparent, stacked shadow.

Kinoshita Kei's behavior was somewhat unusual; when he mentioned things from his childhood, Aiba Yu noticed his wandering gaze.

"Her lying skills are no match for Karin's." Aiba Yu concluded. Karin could lie and play the victim without even blinking. Her mental fortitude was far superior to Kinoshita Kei's.

He learned from Pito's words that Kinoshita Kei's "difficult childhood" was not a fabrication. So his guilty conscience could only mean that he didn't actually want to talk about that. What was he trying to cover up?

"The real cold is in the south during winter... It's better here." Thinking about it carefully, this statement should be based on the premise that he is not in the "southern part" he is talking about at this moment, but there is no doubt that Kinoshita Kei has always lived in this city in southern Japan, studying and helping his grandmother run a coffee shop at the same time. His life path is so simple that it can be seen at a glance.

So where is the "southern region" he's referring to?

Aiba Yu saw the comic books and magazines under his bed, the snacks and his student IDs from childhood to adulthood in his desk drawer, and the notebooks in a locked box with an additional combination lock on the cover.

There were too many densely packed, square characters inside for Aiba Yu to see clearly at first glance, but he could make out the three characters on the title page:

"Mu Xia Jing."

"Mu Xiajing!" Xiang Yeyou suddenly called out.

In his eyes, the person sitting on the balcony shuddered, and the salted fish almost slipped and fell onto the tiled floor.

This is a good reaction. Aiba Yu relaxed his body, leaned against the door, and waited for Kinoshita Kei to continue.

"I...I...I...you...you..." Kinoshita Kei turned around: "Who are you calling? I didn't understand."

Aiba Yu called out in Chinese, and he watched as Kinoshita Kei stammered for a while: "Oh dear, what dialect were you speaking? It doesn't sound like it, it sounds like..."

"The codebook in the third drawer from the bottom left." It was still in Chinese. As soon as Aiba Yu finished speaking, Kinoshita Kei couldn't hold back the salty fish who was still immersed in his feelings of being moved. He took two steps forward and ran over, but stopped halfway. He didn't know whether he should expose his identity and quickly beg for mercy, "I don't know anything" or rush over and hug his leg and shout, "Big brother, I was wrong. I shouldn't have kept it from you."

"B-Big brother, boss," Kinoshita Kei stammered, "The earth shook the high hills, and a scene of timeless beauty unfolded in the streams and mountains?"

The bigwig who seemed to have seen through him didn't react.

"The essence of humanity?"

"..." Aiba Yu looked at him calmly.

Kinoshita Kei's heart pounded even harder. Was the other person an alien who could see through him, or something else entirely? If they were from the same hometown, they could at least pull some strings; hometown friends meeting again...

Tears welled in his eyes. He'd accept being stabbed in the back, since he clearly couldn't beat the other person anyway. But if it was just an alien... that was a whole different story! He might get sliced ​​into pieces!

"The Xia and Shang dynasties and the Western and Eastern Zhou dynasties are divided into two periods!"

Aiba Yu was stunned. He seemed to have heard something similar many, many years ago in a cultural class at the base.

Back then, the group of teenagers disliked academic classes because the instructor, who was muscular and could make any shirt look like a bodysuit, would always pretend to be a cultured person in class, instilling historical and literary concepts into them. He liked to call on people to recite, and if anyone didn't meet the expectations, his fists, which could smash sandbags, would threaten their heads at any time.

The group of teenagers also liked academic classes because they didn't have to go out for training, which was a good time to relax their exhausted muscles. If they weren't afraid of dying, they could try sneaking a nap during class.

But those days were so long ago, so long that when Aiba Yu thought about them again, the first image in his mind was of drowsy teenagers who dared not fall asleep, and the lazy, hypnotic sunlight that fell on them. The dust seemed to be falling asleep as well, drifting slowly in the beams of light and landing on the open books.

Those were textbooks printed by the base itself. When I first got them, the smell of ink hadn't dissipated yet. The binding was very rough, and the cover was just a piece of colored cardstock with the words "History" painted in large black letters.

“…Spring and Autumn Period, and Warring States Period.” Xiangye You uttered these words, vaguely hearing his companions reading aloud with forced enthusiasm. “Xun” stood in front of the instructor, stumbling over the dynasty song that he “didn’t know what use it was.”

Chapter Sixteen: The Time Traveler's Script

Kinoshita Kei found his "fellow townsman" to be somewhat strange; he only had an impression of some "old-fashioned" things and knew nothing about later things.

He was completely clueless about all the popular online language. If it weren't for his young face, Kinoshita Kei would have thought he was an old guy living in the last century.

For example, he could answer with the phrase "the white mountains and black waters of Northeast China," but when Kinoshita Kei said "playing in the mud in Northeast China," Aiba Yu's expression was as bewildered as if he had seen a whole platoon of people squatting on a motorcycle.

"Oh, you arrived quite early? What year did you set off?" Kinoshita Kei thought he was a "senior" who had traveled back in time many years ago.

"..." Aiba Yu didn't understand what he meant by "departure", while Kinoshita Kei had already started talking non-stop.

Having confirmed that Aiba Yu had no intention of attacking him, and knowing that the other party already knew he had a soul from another world, and that he couldn't defeat him in a fight or escape from him, he decided to carefully plan how to build a closer relationship to avoid associating with villains and getting into trouble.

Kinoshita Kei finally relaxed his tense nerves a little: "I'm so unlucky. Others either travel through time while they're asleep, or they travel through time because of an electric shock, or they travel through time after being hit by a truck while saving someone. I was reminiscing about my youth while building a Gundam. My computer and I were both working fine. I was almost finished when suddenly a hole appeared above my head. When I came to my senses, I was a crying baby! I was cold and hungry, and I didn't even have a system!"

"I was thinking, 'Oh no! According to the laws of time travel, if I'm in Gundam, this world is probably going to be a war zone, with Coordinators floating overhead and nuclear bombs being dropped on the ground at the slightest provocation,'" Aiba Yu listened, stunned. Kinoshita Kei, thinking he was also immersed in the encounter with fellow countrymen in another world, spoke with great enthusiasm: "But I found that the world was peaceful, without the bitter and vengeful worldview of Gundam, so I thought it was a reborn city. Then I saw the King of Salted Fish and thought I had a supernatural script. In the end, I found out that it was actually Gaia!"

Kinoshita Kei excitedly slapped his thigh: "Ultraman! If I hadn't shone a flashlight on the TV back then, would Tiga have woken up?"

"Diga?"

This time it was Kinoshita Kei's turn to be stunned: "No way, buddy, you haven't seen it on TV every day? You didn't travel back in time, did you...?"

"What do you think the TV station will broadcast?"

"Ultraman!" Kinoshita Kei raised one hand high and clenched the other into a fist, mimicking a giant's entrance, though his imitation wasn't quite right, and he grinned, revealing a set of big white teeth with a silly look: "The one who wrestled with the monster the other day was Gaia, known as the 'Earth Destroyer.' Tiga was filmed before him, and you haven't even seen it? Well, you're in a worse situation than me. At least I know the general plot of Gaia—hey, you've even appeared in Meta Realm. Did you hang around Nexus? Do you know the Great God Noa? Did you manage to get your hands on the Shield of Paragi?"

Kinoshita Kei rattled off a string of words, Aiba Yuu reacted somewhat when Nexus was mentioned, but when the Shield of Paraji was brought up, he began to look confused again.

“It’s normal that you haven’t seen Ultraman and don’t know,” Kinoshita Kei pulled him to sit on the sofa in the living room. The lazy fish jumped over, but Kinoshita bent down and caught it, then moved it to the table with a towel on it: “Wait for me to sort out the plot…”

It was almost evening, and the café was about to enter its daily peak season. Kinoshita Kei decided to say a few words first and then continue later when he was done with his work.

Within a single day, his emotions fluctuated wildly, from the shock of being called "Mu Xiajing" to the excitement of recognizing a fellow villager. His fellow villager seemed to be even more unfortunate than himself, but appeared to be doing quite well, far more successful than he, an ordinary person—meaning that as long as he clung to a powerful figure, he could survive in this place where monsters frequently ravaged the city.

Kinoshita Kei has begun to believe their story, which suggests that their account of "Uranus" may be true!

Who hasn't dreamed of becoming a hero like Ultraman while watching the series? Kinoshita Kei began to feel a surge of anticipation. His gaze swept over the self-proclaimed "Earth" salted fish king, landing on what seemed to be...

The villagers were still in shock.

Kinoshita Kei felt a little sorry for him. He knew nothing and plunged headlong into a world full of monsters, especially a place like Nexus where even the color grading was oppressive. Now that he knew there was a script to read, it was like coming out of an exam hall after a near-death experience, clutching his failing grade and wanting to cry. Meanwhile, his roommate, while eating spicy snacks, said, "Huh? Wasn't there an answer key? You didn't cheat?"

"Plot, you mean... all stories?" Aiba Yu suddenly lunged forward and grabbed his collar.

"Big brother, don't get agitated, let's talk this out!" Kinoshita Kei raised his hands in surrender, then blurted out, "So you've been transported to the world of a tokusatsu drama! Have you met someone named Komon Kazuki? And the Himeya Junchiju Rei Night Raid Team or something?"

Aiba Yu stared blankly at him. Just as Kinoshita Kei felt like he was about to be strangled by the increasingly tight collar, Pito arched his fish body, sprang over, and smacked Aiba Yu on the forehead with a loud tail flick.

He let go and wiped the water stains off his forehead.

Aiba Yuu wasn't angry, nor did he ignite his silver flame as usual to evaporate the sticky salty water. He sat back down, and Kinoshita Kei smoothed his collar again. He heard Aiba Yuu ask, "What about Mebius? What about Yapool? Are they also stories?"

"Wow, you've been to quite a few places!" Kinoshita Kei leaned closer and patted him on the shoulder. "Mebius is great, a sunny and enthusiastic young man, cute and easy to talk to. If it were me, I would definitely ask him to bring back a set of autographs from all the big shots in the Land of Light. Those are family heirlooms! Limited editions that even Bandai has never produced!"

"If you've seen the show, you definitely wouldn't have missed it. Sigh, what a loss, bro!" Kinoshita Kei gestured with his fingertips as if he were about to continue filming when he suddenly felt his hand go empty. Aiba had become his shadow again, and he had slapped the air.

"Hey bro? Big brother? Eldest brother? Boss?" Kinoshita Kei called out to the blurry figure.

The salted fish chattered on the table: "@＃￥%……＆……" (Stop shouting! Even someone like me, who has lived for billions of years and is of high seniority and high intelligence, is a little shocked, let alone him.)