Live Again, Love Anew

Chapter 25- Lil' Apple: Reborn!

Summary

Lan Yue and the boys travel. Lil' Apple makes an appearance looking a little differently than last time.

Beginning Note

Just a shorter transition chapter. Next chapter will be a little bit of traveling and then the Wens.

I also wanted to ask your guys' opinion on pinyin. (I think that's how you spell it, but it's basically Chinese words translated to English characters.) The point of it is that some of you guys have brought up the Wei Ying and Lan Zhan being related, which I will confirm isn't true. Yes, Wei Ying calls Lan Qiren 'uncle' but that doesn't mean Lan Qiren is actually his uncle. Yes, Lan Yue calls Wei Ying her nephew, but that's only because she and Cangse Sanren were close. The problem I have is that there aren't enough English words to accurately translate all Chinese terms about relations and such. I know that Chinese has a few different ways to say 'uncle' or 'brother' depending on a few factors, but English has only those two terms.

So I guess my question is, are the relations, both blood related and not, too confusing in just English, and should I change to using pinyin to make relations more clear?

I'm not as good with Chinese terms and such, which is why I chose to use English in the first place, but if it'll help readers, then I'll try it out for a week or two. If it works out okay, I might go and change previous chapters to match.

Please let me know what you guys think! Any feedback is welcome.

Lan Yue

Lan Yue's breath fogs in front of her. The mare under her huffs and shifts as it walks and Lan Yue reaches a hand down to pet it soothingly.

"Just a little longer..." She placates, even though she knows the poor mare can't understand her.

It's been a few hours since they left Cloud Recesses, the time now approaching morning as indicated by the grey light of pre-dawn.

The only problem they had encountered was passing through the wards. Lan Yue wasn't given a passage token because she was effectively a prisoner, and the boys were too young to be given one. But in the end, it didn't matter, because the seal on the letter had acted as a token and let them pass through the wards undetected.

Another thing Lan Yue had discovered is that A-Ying was a surprisingly heavy sleeper, while her son would wake every half hour or so to snuggle closer to her and A-Ying before falling back asleep almost instantly.

It... it made her a little sad, actually. Knowing that her son was a light sleeper should be something she learned about him within the first few weeks of his life, but because both A-Huan and A-Zhan were taken away from her mere days after their births, she just never had the time to learn these things.

She must be a pretty pathetic mother to not know her own child's sleeping habits, right? She knew her children's birthdays, but only because she had been the one to birth them. She knew that A-Zhan was quiet and that A-Huan was adorably polite, but only because they had meetings with her once a month.

But that was pretty much it. What kind of mother was she, not knowing her children's favorite colors? A-Zhan had once quietly told her that he liked the color red, but that wasn't really her A-Zhan, was it? That was her boy all grown up, a man that was only her son in name because she had died before he even turned six years old. Or what of her children's favorite toys? All children had one, but beyond knowing that A-Huan had a wooden practice flute a few years ago that he favored, she really had no clue as to what hobbies her boys were developing or what they did in their free time.