Yukinoshita Yukino swallowed the painkiller.
Watching Isac take two relatively straight branches and gesture them back and forth around her left leg, she asked: “What’s that for?”
“A splint — to keep the sprain from getting worse.” Even as he answered, Isac was tearing a salvaged but unwearable short-sleeved shirt into strips, planning to use them to fashion a simple immobilizer for Yukinoshita Yukino’s injured leg.
“Here — straighten your leg.
Tell me if it hurts.”
Yukinoshita Yukino nodded, but right up until the splint was finished, she didn’t make a single sound of pain.
That surprised Isac somewhat, and he asked just to be sure: “It really doesn’t hurt?”
“It’s still within tolerable range — and your technique was very professional.” Yukinoshita Yukino could tell that the boy in front of her had been extremely careful while bandaging her up.
“Looks like I’ve got something of a knack for being a doctor after all.” Isac cracked a small joke.
“I won’t deny it.” The faintest of smiles crossed Yukinoshita Yukino’s face as well.
Then she pointed at the meal container next to the fire and said: “The water has boiled.”
Seeing this, Isac used the chopsticks to nudge the meal container away from the fire, let it cool for a moment, and only then picked it up by hand and passed it to Yukinoshita Yukino.
“Here.”
“Thank you.”
Outside, the sky had now turned fully dark.
The two of them sat there quietly beside the fire, eating by its light.
Their current position was actually the lavatory at the very tail end of the cabin.
It was the one spot in the entire compartment with no aircraft window — which meant no wind could blow in either.
It made for a serviceable three-walled shelter.
Isac had also pried the lavatory door off its hinges and used it to block the opening leading back to the rest of the cabin.
That way it would shield them from the wind and ward off any wildlife visits during the night.
That said, Isac figured the probability of large wildlife being nearby wasn’t high.
A plane crash made an enormous racket — whatever large animals had originally inhabited the area shouldn’t be returning anytime soon.
But it never hurt to plan for the worst, and the extra door panel also helped retain a little heat.
After the meal, the comfort of a full stomach noticeably lifted both their spirits.
Isac took both his and Yukinoshita Yukino’s emptied meal containers, scooped up some more snow nearby, and set them by the fire to melt.
Hot water was something you could never have too much of — let alone with Yukinoshita Yukino currently being an invalid.
Timely fluid intake would help her body recover.
“This sweater — is it yours?” Yukinoshita Yukino pulled the sweater out from under herself.
“Salvaged it,” Isac answered.
“Though the windbreaker draped over you actually is mine.”
“I’m not all that cold anymore.
Take it back and put it on yourself,” Yukinoshita Yukino said.
Isac didn’t refuse outright.
He took the windbreaker, sat down beside Yukinoshita Yukino, and then spread it open and laid it directly over both of them.
“This keeps us both warmer.”
Under extreme conditions, huddling for warmth was Survival 101.
Every shred of body heat was a precious resource — they couldn’t afford to waste a single trace.
“…”
Yukinoshita Yukino didn’t object.
Under normal circumstances, she would absolutely never have allowed a member of the opposite sex this close to her — but their current situation clearly didn’t qualify as normal.
Besides — given that Isac had revived her from hypothermic shock earlier, he had almost certainly performed mouth-to-mouth.
Her first kiss was already gone; what was sitting pressed together to sleep on top of that?
At this thought, the tips of Yukinoshita Yukino’s ears flushed faintly pink.
By the warm glow of the firelight, she finally had the leisure to take stock of the boy beside her.
Isac wasn’t bad-looking.
It wasn’t that he was strikingly handsome — but his features were well-balanced, his eyebrows thick, his nose bridge high.
His overall appearance leaned chiseled rather than the soft pretty-boy type, and especially when he furrowed his brow unconsciously while thinking, his whole presence took on a settled, weighty calm that gave off an inexplicable sense of reassurance.
He was the kind of face that grew on you.
Yukinoshita Yukino had rarely paid much attention to members of the opposite sex before.
As for Isac’s looks — combined with the string of reliable actions he had taken so far — she… didn’t dislike them.
“Is there something on my face?”
Yukinoshita Yukino calmly shifted her gaze away and said in a natural tone: “No.
I was just thinking — Isac-san, you can’t be very old this year, can you?”
“Just graduated from high school.
Was planning to take a couple of days for a trip — and ended up running smack into this whole disaster.” Isac gave a brief summary of his situation.
Before the crash, he had already undergone one transmigration — and a womb-rebirth at that.
But the parents he’d been born to in this current life had passed away before he was even fully grown.
Still, before they went, they had left him a sizable fortune — enough that he could live out the rest of this life in comfort without ever having to work.
A second-generation rich kid, basically.
This year he had graduated high school and gotten into college, and planned to head out, clear his head, and experience things he had never tried in either this life or the one before.
He had originally wanted to go skydiving, but worried about something going wrong — so he had settled for the next-best option and decided on a helicopter ride instead.
After all, if something went wrong skydiving, the fatality rate was 100% — whereas a helicopter crash still had an 80% survival rate, didn’t it?
Surely he couldn’t get as unlucky as Lao Da, right?
Eh — turned out, exactly that unlucky.
Proof positive: don’t court death, and death won’t come for you.
If Isac were given the choice again, he would never set foot in anything that flew for the rest of this life!
“That’s understandable.
Isac-san, going by your name — are you from Daxia?
Your Japanese is impeccable.” Yukinoshita Yukino said.
The moment Isac heard this he froze, then answered in astonishment: “Japanese?
But I’ve been speaking Daxianese this whole time.
I was actually thinking, Yukinoshita-san, that your Daxianese was quite good!”
At those words, both of them fell silent at the same time.
Isac then realized that the ‘Daxia’ she had referred to matched the name of the country he had been in before the crash — exactly.
Was it possible his previous transmigration had already landed him in the anime crossover world — only he’d been born in Daxia rather than Nihon, which was why he had never crossed paths with any of those famous anime heroines?
Now it wasn’t strange anymore.
Now it wasn’t strange at all.
But that still didn’t explain how the two of them, speaking different languages right at this moment, could clearly understand the meaning behind each other’s words.
A Synesthesia Beacon?
Holy shit — so you’re into that too…
Out of nowhere, Isac suddenly threw out:
“Ba ba bo yi.”
“Ba what?”
Yukinoshita Yukino blinked, blanked, then blinked again, utterly unable to make sense of what Isac had just said — though she did register that he had been speaking Daxianese.
Seeing Yukinoshita Yukino’s reaction, Isac finally had his confirmation: between him and Yukinoshita Yukino, there very likely existed some kind of translator akin to a Synesthesia Beacon — one that passively rendered each of their languages into the other’s native tongue, but had no way of handling utterances that carried no semantic meaning.
How do you say ‘Zhidou’?
It’s just ‘Zhidou.’
Isac walked Yukinoshita Yukino through his line of reasoning, and added on the side: “There’s one more thing I should clear up.
The aircraft I was on actually wasn’t the same flight as yours.”
“Not the same flight?” Yukinoshita Yukino didn’t follow what Isac meant.
Could it really be that two planes had crashed simultaneously?
That was surely far too improbable!
“To be more precise… what I was on was actually a helicopter.”
Yukinoshita Yukino: …
That really did rule out them being on the same flight.