A string of bubbles escaped from Li Leyou’s open mouth as she stared blankly. Only then did she realize there was another problem—she could breathe underwater.
The suffocating feeling of drowning was gone.
Her legs had turned into a fish tail—she had become a mermaid!
It took her only a second to figure out the cause.
That shady-looking underground illegal laboratory wasn’t conducting human experiments at all. It was conducting mermaid experiments?!
Why had no one told her?
Forget it. The whole world had changed anyway. Changing species probably wasn’t that big a deal.
Besides, surely she could turn this tail back into legs, right? Luohm and the others could change forms whenever they wanted.
Li Leyou optimistically reassured herself.
She drifted up and down in the turbulent seawater. Although she no longer felt like she was drowning, her human instincts still urged her to reach the surface and breathe.
Li Leyou had been born inland. In her entire life, the only time she had ever been in water was when she splashed around in the children’s pool at her residential complex.
She knew how to play in water, but she couldn’t actually swim.
And this rough open sea was nothing like a children’s swimming pool. Even with a fish tail, Li Leyou could only let the waves carry her around. She spent ages spinning in circles underwater.
Her newly grown appendage wasn’t exactly cooperating.
She imagined herself swimming like a fish—light, graceful, and effortless—but in reality, she looked as though half her body was paralyzed.
Like a fake fish.
Not only could she barely make any progress, she was exhausted.
Could some fish please come over and teach her how they actually moved their bodies when swimming? She only knew how to use her waist, and now her lower back was so sore it felt like it might cramp.
“One, two, one… one, two, one…”
Li Leyou counted the rhythm in her head and swished her tail from side to side accordingly. It was still awkward and made her look like some kind of mechanical fish, but it was the best swimming technique she had managed to figure out.
After struggling upward for what felt like forever, she finally realized just how deep she had sunk.
The higher she went, the brighter the light from the surface became. At the same time, the waves grew larger. The thunder from earlier had disappeared, though.
She vigorously swung her tail and finally broke through the surface.
“Phew—”
She let out a breath of relief, only to have a dark object hurled straight at her head by a wave.
“Ow!”
Li Leyou covered her head and took a closer look.
It was a pitch-black wooden barrel.
Where had that come from?
She looked up and saw a ship pitching violently in the waves not far away.
What an old-fashioned ship, Li Leyou thought.
It looked exactly like the European medieval sailing-ship models she had seen before.
Except this one wasn’t a model.
There were people on it!
Her eyesight seemed to have improved too. Even from this distance, she could clearly see the terrified people shouting aboard the ship.
Most of them were tanned, thin, and dressed in extremely crude clothing. Some wore nothing more than rough burlap wrapped around their lower bodies. They staggered with the rocking ship, and those who couldn’t keep their balance crashed into the masts or rolled across the deck.
The things stored on the ship were also falling into the sea because they hadn’t been secured properly.
There were countless wooden barrels—the same kind as the one that had just smacked Li Leyou in the head.
A man wearing boots, trousers, and a long coat rushed out of the cabin and pointed toward the sea, shouting something.
Then a huge wave crashed onto the ship and knocked him flat.
An old-fashioned ship.
People dressed in old-fashioned clothes.
Li Leyou floated in the water with only her head above the surface, turning around in confusion.
The waters where she had fallen weren’t extremely far from Luohm’s castle. At least, when she looked toward the horizon, she should have been able to see a distant line of land.
But now, no matter which way she looked, there was nothing but endless ocean.
The horizon had disappeared.
“Crash—whoosh—BOOM!”
The waves continued battering the ship.
It felt as if the world she had painstakingly rebuilt in her mind was being battered apart along with it.
She nearly cried.
Where the heck am I now? How far away am I from where I fell into the water? And what is this random ship and these random people?!
“La…”
Suddenly, a distant singing voice pierced through the roar of the sea.
Yet instead of calming the ocean, that tranquil, ethereal melody brought even more violent waves.
Li Leyou stared in disbelief as the sea suddenly surged upward, forming waves more than ten meters high.
One wave piled upon another, until the crest rose dozens of meters into the sky.
Those waves looked like enormous hands reaching toward heaven, lifting up a…
blue-green fish tail?
Li Leyou tilted her head back and rubbed her eyes, making sure she wasn’t imagining it.
Sure enough, standing atop the towering wave was a mermaid with a blue-green tail.
When the enormous wave carrying him crashed down onto the ship, completely swallowing it beneath the water, the mermaid followed the retreating waves and disappeared back into the sea.
But Li Leyou had a feeling that while he was observing the ship, he had also glanced in her direction.
Their eyes had met from afar.
She hadn’t been able to see his face clearly, but after getting lost in the middle of the ocean, she had finally found a mermaid who might know her.
How could she let him go?
“Hey! Wait! Friend! Help me!”
“Hello? Are you a mermaid? Can you help me?!”
There was no response.
“Ptooey! Ptooey!”
The waves left over from the massive surge repeatedly crashed over her head, forcing Li Leyou to dive underwater.
Because she was so desperate to call out to him, she somehow instinctively learned how to produce sound underwater.
Tiny scales and folds appeared along her cheeks and down toward her neck. The strange sound seemed to come from there.
Apparently, when people were desperate enough, they could accomplish anything.
Even her newly acquired tail, which she still hadn’t learned to control, cooperated a little.
But the mermaid whose face she hadn’t seen clearly had already disappeared into the sea without coming to find her.
Maybe I wasn’t loud enough. He didn’t hear me?
Li Leyou floated up and down several times, but she couldn’t see that blue-green tail anywhere.
She had no choice but to surface again.
The huge ship had already been swallowed by the sea. Only pieces of floating debris remained—wooden planks, barrels, and other fragments.
Li Leyou grabbed a barrel that drifted toward her, completely at a loss.
“What am I supposed to do…? What is happening…? Luohm… This is all your fault!”
She suddenly became angry and smacked the nearby barrel.
The barrel slowly drifted behind her.
Then a pale hand gently pushed it aside.
A wet head quietly emerged from behind the barrel, revealing a pair of deep green eyes staring at Li Leyou’s back with cautious curiosity.
“Luohm, you’re insane! Anla is even worse! You’re all crazy! Just wait until I get my hands on you!”
After angrily cursing them, Li Leyou suddenly sensed something and turned around.
The head half-submerged behind her startled her.
“Ah!”
Her frightened cry transformed into a delighted scream the moment she recognized his face.
“AH!!”
“LUOHM!!!”
Hair that resembled the feathers of a peacock, shifting through beautiful shades of color, clung wetly to Luohm’s cheeks.
Separated by a wooden barrel, he stared at Li Leyou.
When she shouted his name, Luohm blinked.
Then he slowly moved closer.
When he came within arm’s reach, he leaned forward and sniffed her scent.
Then he quickly retreated again, returning to the same safe distance.
“Ni be tanjo…”
“What does that mean? I can’t understand you.”
Li Leyou swam a little closer.
Luohm moved backward slightly and switched to a language she could understand.
“Your scent is strange. You have the scent of a human.”
As he spoke, his glassy eyes lowered again.
He was looking at Li Leyou’s tail.
It was bright golden—a striking color that stood out vividly against the blue sea.
“I have never seen a fish tail that color before. Which mermaid clan are you from? And why do you know my name?”
Her scent was strange.
Her tail was strange.
And she spoke the language of humans.
The equally confused human and mermaid stared at each other.
Li Leyou also noticed something was wrong.
This Luohm had long hair, spreading through the water like seaweed. The ends curled slightly, and its color was as bright as the hair of younger mermaids like Haixia and Haize.
It wasn’t the dark blue-green, shoulder-length hair she was familiar with.
His facial features were roughly the same, but when she looked closely, his cheeks were slightly fuller and his eyes a little rounder.
The difference in his aura was even more obvious.
There was none of the deep, unpredictable darkness or habitual fake smile she knew so well.
Simply put, the Luohm standing before her was as clear and pure as the surface of the sea beneath sunlight.
He had gone from a deep, smoky agarwood scent to the fresh scent of lemon and sea salt!
A few days ago, she had thought Luohm looked like a young man.
Only now did she understand what Luohm had actually looked like when he was truly young.
“You… how did you become like this?” Li Leyou asked.
Did he come back from the dead? Did he suddenly become young again?
Luohm quietly looked at her.
When he realized she had no intention of answering his questions, he quickly turned around and dived beneath the water.
Li Leyou only caught a glimpse of his tail.
His spread-out fins swayed like the tail of a betta fish before disappearing into the sea.
“Don’t go! Wait! Luohm!”
She hadn’t expected him to leave without saying another word.
Furious, Li Leyou chased after him.
But he was far too fast.
In the blink of an eye, he had vanished.
After exhausting herself trying to catch him and still losing him, Li Leyou could only stare blankly.
Then, in frustration, she flipped her tail and lay flat on her back on the surface of the sea.
Luohm left the open sea and returned to the Coral Sea, where his people gathered.
The area was close to the coastline.
The deepest part was only about fifty meters. Vast coral reefs had grown into nest-like formations, providing homes for the mermaids.
Because the water was shallow, sunlight could shine directly through it.
The sea here looked like clear, translucent jelly.
Among the coral branches of every color, schools of brightly colored fish swam back and forth.
Occasionally, a blue-green tail would emerge from among the corals, immediately attracting a group of little fish.
The moment Luohm returned, a figure shot out from behind a cluster of red coral.
“Luohm! What took you so long? Did you deal with them?”
His blood brother Anla nearly crashed into him.
Luohm nimbly dodged him and casually smacked him with his tail.
Anla knew Luohm didn’t like people getting too close, but he could never seem to remember.
Every time, he had to be hit with Luohm’s tail before it came back to him.
He swam closer again and asked,
“Are all those humans dead?”
“I don’t know. But they’ve lost their ship. They can’t get anywhere near the Coral Sea again.”
“Luohm, this kind of thing isn’t suited to you. You should have let me handle it. I would’ve done a cleaner job. Once they fell into the water, I would’ve bitten them all to death.”
Anla bared his sharp teeth with a fierce expression.
Luohm ignored him.
He swam through the coral reef to find Asa.
Asa was the leader of their clan and the spiritual “mother” of everyone, as well as an elder by blood.
Mermaid clans were bound together by bloodlines and were generally led by older females, who possessed extensive experience and the wisdom of age.
Because females were responsible for bearing offspring, female mermaids were also generally larger and stronger than males.
Asa was one such mermaid.
Her tail alone was nearly three meters long.
She was already very old. Her hair had turned a dark blue-green, but she remained extremely healthy.
She could still eat more than half a shark in one meal.
Toward the younger members of the clan, Asa was dignified yet loving.
Toward Luohm, because of what he had experienced as a child, she was especially gentle and protective.
“What is it, my child?” Asa asked. “Did something go wrong when you drove the humans away?”
“No. I drove them away. But I encountered a strange female mermaid in the open sea. She may have been driven out by another clan. She has now entered our waters.”