CHAPTER 3 - FIRST WORDS
She needed to be able to understand him.
That was the first practical thought that managed to get through everything else. She did not know what he was. She did not know where she was. She did not know how to get home or whether getting home was even possible right now. But she was standing two meters away from a man she apparently needed to talk to and she could not understand a single thing he said.
"Weiwei," she said quietly.
[Yes Host!]
"Can you translate. His language. So I can understand him and he can understand me."
[Yes! Translation is available as a base function of the Save The World By Bearing A Cub System! Does Host wish to activate language translation now?]
"Yes. Please. Right now."
[Translation activated! Host will now be able to understand and communicate with all inhabitants of the Beast Continent!]
Lin Wan straightened up from the ground, brushed the damp sand from her knees with what remained of her dignity, and looked at Riven properly for the first time without shock fogging everything over.
He was tall. Genuinely tall, the kind that made the space around him feel like it had adjusted to accommodate him. The hide around his waist was dark and worn smooth with use. His shoulders were broad and still and he held himself the way certain people did, not with effort but with the natural ease of someone who had never once in their life felt the need to make themselves smaller for anyone.
The three stripes on his arm were darker than she had first thought. Not tattoos, she was beginning to suspect. Something else. Something that belonged to him the way his eyes did, the way the stillness did.
He had been watching her the whole time she was looking at him.
She held his gaze.
He spoke.
"What is a small female like you doing here alone," he said. His voice was low and direct, no softness in it but no cruelty either, just the flat efficiency of someone who asked questions and expected them answered. "You have no escort. Where are your family, your mates."
"I don't have mates," Lin Wan said.
Something happened in his face.
It was small. Easy to miss. A stillness that was different from his regular stillness, a fractional pause in whatever was moving behind those dark eyes. He looked at her and then he did something she had not expected.
He sniffed.
Not obviously. Not rudely. Just a slow, quiet drawing in of air, his chin tilting slightly, his attention sharpening in a way that felt less like a person curious about a smell and more like something calibrating itself to new information.
Then he took one step back.
And Lin Wan watched his expression do something complicated.
It lasted only a second and then it was gone, replaced by the same neutral surface he had been wearing since the pool. But in that second she had seen it. Something that moved through him quickly and settled somewhere quiet, something she did not have a name for yet.
Weiwei provided one, without being asked.
[Host,] she said inside Lin Wan's mind, her voice lower and more private now, like she understood the moment required it. [Females on the Beast Continent make up approximately twenty percent of the total population. Unmated females are extremely rare. Most females take multiple mates throughout their lives as a matter of survival and social structure. The beastman in front of Host has just confirmed through scent that Host carries no mate mark. This is significant information to him.]
Lin Wan kept her face neutral.
Multiple mates.
She filed that away for later because later was when she would deal with it.
"I lost my memory," she said to Riven.
He looked at her.
"I don't know how I got here. I don't know where I came from. I woke up near this pool and I don't remember anything before that."
She held his gaze steadily while she said it and she watched him process it. He was not a man who reacted quickly or visibly. He took things in and turned them over somewhere internal and only showed you what he decided to show you. Right now he was showing her nothing, which told her he had not decided anything yet.
His eyes moved.
Down. Not in the way that made her want to step back, not invasive, just observational, the way someone looked at a thing they were trying to understand. He was looking at her clothes. Her jeans. Her light top. Her small purse still hanging from her shoulder. Things that meant nothing to him and everything about her all at once.
"Your clothing," he said. "I have not seen its like. No tribe I know makes anything of this kind."
Lin Wan said nothing.
He looked at her face.
She looked back.
The silence between them was not comfortable but it was not hostile either. It sat in the space like something waiting to become one or the other depending on what happened next.
Then Riven uncrossed his arms.
"Come," he said.
He turned and walked.
Just like that. No explanation. No asking whether she would follow. He simply turned and moved with that same unhurried certainty and expected the rest of the world to arrange itself accordingly.
Lin Wan looked at her countdown.
02:31:07
She looked at his back.
She followed.