There's No Love In the Deathzone (BL) novel Chapter 94

Chapter 94: Chapter 91. (un)Found Family

Zein didn’t think he would get any information this fast--although, to be fair, it was already a month. Of course, he also knew it wasn’t the request that he made, just a side information about his mother, but...

Zein closed his eyes and felt the breeze to calm his mind. Perhaps this was why Radia brought him to this place.

After making a request for his purchase, Radia brought him to a restaurant on the north side of Althrea. The place consisted of many small private gardens, fully separated from one another, even equipped with a noise-canceling device.

Radia told him that each ’room’ was fashioned in different settings. This one had an open pavilion above a small pond where they could hear the sound of trickling water and felt the soft breeze upon their skin. Thickets of bamboo trees surrounded the pavilion like a fence, and the blue sky was bright without the sun being harsh.

A scenery filled with greens and water--just like the businessman that he was, Radia sure knew how to cater to his conversational partner.

"It’s quite hard tracking information from the red-zone. The only thing we managed to find is just a little bit of information on your mother, embarrassingly so," Radia poured the tea into his and Zein’s cup, prompting the guide to open his eyes and turned to face the man.

He kept his silence, staring at the steaming round cup with greenish liquid inside. A tiny stalk floated on the surface, swaying gently, and Zein looked at it while listening to Radia.

"Lucia was a guide stationed in Eiyuta more than thirty years ago, a yellow-zone city on the northern side of area-12, near the border with the Northern Alliance,"

Still watching the stalk bob on the water’s surface, Zein asked flatly. "Did she come from the north, then?"

It wasn’t something surprising though, considering Zein’s striking blue eyes.

"Yes," Radia answered with a smile. "Which is why we’ll try to move the investigation to the north, bearing in mind that the person in the shard’s memory is your ancestor."

Zein nodded, taking the cup that had cooled down enough, sniffing the tea with narrowed eyes.

"What I want to tell you today, however, is about your possible origin," Radia put down his tea and pushed a plate of flower-shaped sweet rice cake in front of Zein. "It’s unsweetened, drink that with this."

Zein sipped the warm tea--it was rather bitter, but not so much that he couldn’t swallow it. The fragrance was nice and calming, making it quite different from his usual intake nowadays, which was mainly filled with sweet things.

"Your mother was registered as a B-class, but she was quite timid, and had an inherent fear of men and esper, so it was quite hard for her to have a steady job,"

Zein bit into one of the flower-shaped sweet rice cake while thinking about a guide who was afraid of esper. There were actually a lot of guides who were afraid of espers, especially those in the red-zone, so he didn’t think much of it. But he did think about the root of that fear--was his mother experiencing some kind of trauma with espers?

"She mainly worked to guide female espers, and lived in a house with two other women; one female guide, and one civilian," Radia continued his story. "About thirty years ago, she disappeared."

Zein paused then, and put down the small rice cake in his hand. He stared wordlessly at the esper, but his slightly frowning eyes seemed to push Radia to hurry up and continue.

"The thing I’m about to tell you is strictly coming from the correspondence that the two women did with Lucia after her disappearance from Eiyuta," now, the esper put his arms on the table, fingers intertwining as he looked straight at Zein. "It seems that she followed a man, an esper that she met during one of her commission works,"

"A man and an esper, with her fear?" Zein looked down, staring at the wooden table for a bit, and suddenly grabbed his teacup and gulped it down. When he slammed the teacup down, he muttered with gritted teeth. "She got imprinted."

Zein remembered that particular information--the only information he knew about her mother, that the grandma next door told him in a slip of tongue.

"Yes, it seemed to be so," Radia gave a subtle smile, a bitter one. "Within the last letter that they exchange, Lucia mentioned something important; that she was pregnant,"

The blue eyes flickered, but Radia didn’t stop there.

"And that someone was after her partner’s life, maybe hers too."

Slowly, Radia took the empty cup in front of Zein and filled it with a fresh batch of tea. "The last letter came in the fall twenty-eight years ago."

And then Zein was born the following year, whichever month that was. If the last letter stated that she was still with the esper, then it was clear that Zein was the son of that esper, and not the man who sold him to Umbra, a scum called Marshall Tadros.

Zein didn’t even know whether he should be glad about it.

"We still don’t know how she could get involved with Marshall Tadros, but we couldn’t find any link between her and Tadros before the winter of that year," placing the cup in front of the guide again, Radia added. "From what we get, he suddenly appeared in Araka the following year along with your mother and a newborn baby--you, I presumed."

There was silence for a while after that, as Zein played with the steaming cup, turning it round and round until the floating leaf twirled on the surface.