“Is she a wandering merfolk?” Asa asked.
Having lived in the ocean for so long, Asa had experienced all kinds of things.
There were always some merfolk who left their original tribes for one reason or another, or were forced to leave and became wanderers.
“As long as she isn’t a human approaching our territory, there’s no need to worry about her. A wandering merfolk won’t stay in one place for long. She’ll leave soon enough,” Asa said.
Laom had originally wanted to describe what was strange about the mermaid he had encountered—the human scent lingering on her body and the fact that she spoke a human language.
But after hesitating for a moment, he ultimately decided not to mention it.
Perhaps she was a wandering mermaid who had been rejected by her own kind because of the unusual color of her tail or some other unfortunate circumstance. If he mentioned those things, she might be treated with hostility by the tribe and driven away again.
Asa was right. A wandering mermaid wouldn’t stay in one sea for long, so there was no need to interfere.
After leaving Asa, Laom returned to his nest.
His nest was somewhat isolated from the others. He didn’t like decorating it with colorful coral, nor did he like the brilliantly colored sea anemones that often grew nearby. Whenever they appeared, he would clear them away, leaving his “home” unusually plain.
The small fish that lived among the coral reefs didn’t like staying around his home either.
Laom, however, preferred the peace and quiet.
The only annoying thing was that Anla, his younger brother who had grown up alongside him, insisted on living nearby, making himself the only source of noise around Laom’s home.
Just as Laom was about to rest, the energetic Anla came rushing over again.
“Laom! I heard a group of whitefin sharks came from the northern waters. Want to go hunting?”
Laom didn’t like eating sharks.
“No.”
Anla immediately laughed loudly. “Don’t tell me calling the waves used up too much of your strength and now you can’t even swim! You’re so useless!”
Laom turned around and slapped him across the head with his tail.
Anla refused to back down. In the blink of an eye, the two merfolk were fighting, stirring up sand from the seabed and sending clouds of murky water swirling around them.
After their fight, Anla failed to beat his older brother. Furious, he smashed two pieces of coral beside the entrance and decided to go into the open sea alone to hunt the whitefin sharks.
Meanwhile, Li Leyou had been floating on her back in the middle of the ocean, wallowing in despair. But once her stomach started growling, she had no choice but to pull herself together and think about what she could eat.
There was obviously no way she could find Grandma Su Wei’s shrimp dumplings, pasta, or giant chicken legs in the middle of the vast ocean.
The only thing available was fish.
She dipped her head underwater and saw schools of fish swimming through the sea.
She didn’t recognize a single species. She didn’t know whether they were edible or whether they tasted good.
But hunger was urging her on.
After observing them for a while, Li Leyou finally decided to try catching one.
Only after trying did she realize that catching fish was incredibly difficult.
A fish would swim right past her, but the moment she reached for it, it would suddenly speed up and dart away.
Sometimes her fingers even brushed against its scales, but because the fish was so slippery, it still managed to escape.
Trying to catch fish with her bare hands was a little too much to ask of a former human who had only been a mermaid for half a day.
Fortunately, the large ship that had been torn apart by the waves had left behind some useful materials floating on the surface.
She found several open wooden barrels and tried using one to scoop up fish, but the results were still terrible.
After swimming around for a while, she eventually found a large, battered fishing net.
After cleaning it up, she used it to catch fish.
Finally, she managed to trap one.
It had grayish-black scales, with the fins along its back joined together. Its body was flat.
Even after Li Leyou caught it, it continued thrashing violently. If it hadn’t still been tangled in the net, it probably would have escaped.
Li Leyou held the fish down with both hands as it slapped its tail wildly. She leaned her head back to avoid the water it splashed everywhere and wondered:
How am I supposed to eat this?
Grilled fish?
Impossible. Where was she supposed to find fire in the middle of the ocean?
Apparently, she could only eat it raw.
But was she really supposed to just bite into it?
She couldn’t bring herself to do that. She wasn’t hungry enough to go that far.
Li Leyou sighed at the sea and found a floating wooden plank.
She slammed the fish onto it, intending to kill it first.
“Ew… ugh… ow… tsk…”
Throughout the process of stunning the fish, cutting it open, and removing its organs and intestines, Li Leyou kept making disgusted noises.
Without a proper tool, this wasn’t really cleaning a fish.
It was more like tearing a fish apart.
At one point, the fish seemed to come back to life and suddenly started thrashing again, its bloody body flopping around on the wooden plank.
Li Leyou rinsed the fish blood from her hands in the seawater and stared helplessly at the fish, which had been gutted yet was somehow still jumping around.
She remembered watching her mother clean fish before.
It had never seemed this difficult.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Can you please stop jumping? You’re kind of freaking me out.”
Eventually, the fish stopped moving.
Li Leyou lay on the wooden plank, cautiously checked it, then gingerly continued pulling out the intestines, scraping off the scales, and tearing away the skin.
After struggling for quite a while, she finally managed to produce a pile of fish meat that looked relatively edible.
The seawater around her had become terribly fishy from all the washing she had done.
She dragged her makeshift kitchen counter and dining table to a cleaner patch of water and finally began eating.
Surprisingly, the fish wasn’t nearly as fishy as she had expected. It even had a slightly sweet taste.
But without any dipping sauce, she quickly got tired of it after a few bites.
Would fish balls taste better? Li Leyou wondered.
As she ate, she pounded the fish meat into balls, squeezed them together, and stuffed them into her mouth.
Well, changing the shape hadn’t made them any tastier.
She had simply wasted her time.
Just as her rather pathetic fish meal was coming to an end, she still didn’t feel full.
Then she noticed something strange moving in the water nearby.
Li Leyou dove underwater.
The moment she saw what was swimming toward her in the distance, she abandoned the rest of her meal and turned around to flee.
Most humans, after being submerged in seawater and seeing sharks approaching, would probably react the same way.
She didn’t know what kind of fish she had eaten earlier, but she knew that the creatures swimming toward her were sharks.
Whatever kind they were, judging by their size and teeth, they clearly weren’t vegetarians.
And whether they liked eating humans or fish, she currently qualified as both.
So why wouldn’t she run?
She swam faster than she had when chasing after Laom earlier.
But sharks were famously fast swimmers.
Soon, several of them caught up with her.
Li Leyou held her breath, only to realize that the sharks quickly overtook her.
She stopped in place.
The breath she had been holding escaped from her mouth in a stream of bubbles.
Wait…
She realized that the sharks looked like they were fleeing even more desperately than she was.
Something really was chasing them.
A figure flashed past Li Leyou so quickly that she could only make out a blue-green tail.
It sped after the sharks.
Li Leyou’s eyes lit up.
Laom!
She immediately followed.
Suddenly, the merfolk ahead stopped sharply and turned around, swimming back toward her.
When they were only a few meters apart, Li Leyou finally saw his face.
It wasn’t Laom.
But it was someone familiar.
Anla.
A younger version of him.
His messy hair floated around his head like a lionfish.
If Laom had been the only younger version she’d encountered, Li Leyou might not have been completely certain.
But now Anla had also transformed from a sinister, smiling troublemaker into a wild lionfish.
There was no doubt about it.
If she wasn’t dreaming or hallucinating, then she had definitely traveled back to their younger years.
Is time travel really this easy?
Is someone secretly setting me up?
If something as unlikely as time travel could happen to her twice, then why had she never won the lottery?!
This time, she really couldn’t comfort herself anymore.
Li Leyou’s mental state completely collapsed.
Anla was incredibly fast.
In the blink of an eye, he circled around Li Leyou twice, his tail moving so quickly that it made her dizzy.
He stared at her golden tail for a while before opening his mouth and spouting a string of incomprehensible merfolk words.
Li Leyou asked, “Can you speak human language?”
Anla responded with another stream of merfolk gibberish.
Apparently, he couldn’t.
Good.
Li Leyou felt relieved and immediately started cursing him.
“Are you freaking crazy, Gold Teeth? Why are you such a horrible person? And why are you always putting your hands where they don’t belong? Did you cause me to time-travel again? Why the hell did you push me into the ocean?! Are you even human? What did I ever do to you? Seriously, I’m so done with you! You damn—&…&…!”
A moment later, Li Leyou was screaming as she fled for her life through the ocean while Anla chased after her, trying to hit her.
Although Anla couldn’t speak human language like Laom and couldn’t understand much human speech, it wasn’t difficult for him to realize that Li Leyou was insulting him.
And with Anla’s temper, how could he possibly tolerate that?
He immediately decided to teach this strange mermaid who had intruded into their waters a lesson.
Li Leyou was practically forced to train her swimming skills.
When she was already gasping for breath from being chased, a sentence suddenly flashed through her mind.
The strange words Laom had once told her:
“Mo ye ka ha nie laomu!”
Li Leyou might have been terrible at singing, but she had an excellent memory for lyrics. She remembered the phrase surprisingly well.
She didn’t notice that after shouting those words repeatedly for several hundred meters, Anla, who had been chasing her, had suddenly stopped in stunned disbelief.
Realizing he wasn’t following her anymore, Li Leyou stopped and looked back.
Anla cautiously kept a distance of more than ten meters between them before calling something out.
Li Leyou couldn’t understand what he said.
The only thing she caught was the word “Laom.”
She didn’t have time to think about it.
She nodded repeatedly.
“Yes, yes, Laom!”
Anla’s expression became even stranger.
What he had actually asked was:
“Why did you say those words? Are you Laom’s mate?”
At that moment, another blue-green tail appeared on the other side of the ocean and swam toward them.
Anla sensed Laom’s arrival before Li Leyou did.
He immediately asked curiously, “Laom, is this strange mermaid your mate? When did you get yourself a mate? Why didn’t I know?”
Laom emerged between them.
Having heard those words from far away, he was already surprised.
But when Anla asked the question, he immediately denied it.
“No…”
Li Leyou, however, saw Laom appear and didn’t hesitate for even a second.
She rushed over and wrapped both arms around his tail.
Compared to Anla, Laom was obviously more trustworthy.
“Help! Your brother is trying to kill me!”
Laom had never encountered such an audacious mermaid before.
Caught completely off guard, he was firmly grabbed by her.
Among merfolk, touching someone’s tail was an extremely intimate gesture.
Merfolk were generally reserved in expressing their feelings. Even mates would only gently entwine their tails when their emotions were especially intense.
Most of the time, however, their tails were weapons used to viciously strike an enemy’s vulnerable areas.
For someone like Li Leyou to cling tightly to another merfolk’s tail could only be described as an underwater hooligan.
The young merfolk froze for a moment before struggling violently.
Perhaps because Li Leyou had just gotten used to catching fish, when she felt the large tail thrashing beneath her hands, she instinctively tightened her grip so she wouldn’t be thrown away.
Nearby, Anla watched the two of them tangled together as they spun around in the water.
He was completely dumbfounded.
But soon, the panicked look on Laom’s face made him burst into delighted, schadenfreude-filled laughter.