The sun sank below the horizon, taking away the only reliable reference point she had for finding her direction.
And at night, the open sea became even more terrifying than it was during the day.
Li Leyou, who habitually surfaced to breathe, constantly felt as though some huge fish might be lurking beneath her—like a shark silently approaching and taking a bite out of her.
So every now and then, while swimming, she would suddenly become suspicious and flick her tail hard, looking around nervously—just like she used to feel as a child after watching a horror movie.
Whenever a relatively large fish passed by, she would immediately widen her eyes and study it carefully to see whether it was going to attack her, while calculating whether she could actually beat it.
If some strange-looking creature approached, she would first swim several meters away to figure out what the thing was, or simply take a detour to avoid it.
But there were simply too many large fish and bizarre creatures in the ocean. After both her body and mind reached their limits, Li Leyou suddenly gave up and decided to stop worrying about everything.
Forget it.
She couldn’t find her direction, she couldn’t swim much farther, and she was sleepy anyway. She might as well leave it to fate.
With that thought, she closed her eyes and let herself drift with the current.
The gentle seawater rocked and carried her like a cradle. Before she knew it, Li Leyou had fallen asleep.
When she finally woke up and opened her eyes, something wonderful happened.
Wasn’t that, not far away, the coastline she had been longing for?
The nighttime current had actually carried her close to her destination. After all the bad luck she had experienced, fortune had finally decided to favor her.
The surface of the sea under the sunlight was breathtakingly beautiful, filling her with hope. The gloom of the previous night seemed to evaporate along with the sunlight and seawater.
Li Leyou eagerly swam toward the shore. As she got closer, she discovered that it was a deserted beach. Beyond the yellow sand was a stretch of green forest, and she couldn’t see any signs of human activity anywhere.
With the shore right in front of her, Li Leyou began trying to figure out how to turn her golden fish tail back into a pair of legs.
She stared at her tail.
“Turn into legs, turn into legs, turn into legs…”
Her tail refused to cooperate.
She even tried massaging it, kneading and squeezing it, but she still couldn’t get it to split apart.
“Help! How am I supposed to change it?!”
Li Leyou buried both hands in her hair.
Yesterday, when she had transformed into a mermaid, she had been almost completely unconscious. She had only vaguely remembered waking up in pain—and by then, the transformation was already complete.
So it was probably some instinctive bodily transformation that had occurred when she was on the verge of death.
After several unsuccessful attempts, Li Leyou decided to use her old method.
She immediately shouted the magic phrase that summoned a mermaid.
Someone, please come and teach her how to turn this thing into human legs!
Otherwise, the shore she had been dreaming about was right in front of her, yet she couldn’t even get onto it.
She was already planning to get ashore as quickly as possible, figure out how to start a fire, and eat some cooked food.
However, this time, that familiar blue-green tail never appeared.
She called out intermittently for half an hour, but there wasn’t the slightest response.
At first, Li Leyou suspected that he was too far away to hear her. Eventually, she became certain that he simply didn’t want to come.
After all, before leaving the previous night, he had clearly told her that he wouldn’t come again.
So when he said he wouldn’t come, he really meant it.
Fine. She would have to rely on herself.
Li Leyou rode a wave toward the beach, crashed onto the sand, and rolled several times toward the dry shore.
She would get onto land first. Maybe once she was ashore, her legs would naturally return after a while.
The sun was blazing, and the sand beside her was scorching hot. Li Leyou felt miserable from the heat, to the point that her mind was beginning to grow hazy.
She could hear the sound of the waves beside her and desperately wanted to return to the cool seawater.
But no.
Just endure it. Just endure it a little longer.
She told herself this and simply closed her eyes, silently bearing the heat.
She waited and waited.
Her tail gradually lost its moisture and shine. The dress covering her body clung to her like dried pickled vegetables, while the exposed skin on her body became red and began to peel.
Eventually, her lips became so dry that they cracked, and every time she moved, tiny beads of blood appeared.
She had a feeling that after becoming a mermaid, she wasn’t nearly as resistant to sunlight as she had been as a human.
If she kept roasting herself like this, her legs might not even have time to appear before she was turned into delicious dried salted fish.
Li Leyou finally sat up and decided to give up on this painful experiment.
However, after struggling to roll herself several times toward the sea, she suddenly realized something was wrong.
She looked carefully.
When she had first crawled ashore, the sea had been only a few meters away.
Now it was at least a hundred meters away.
Was this normal?
The tide was going out at this time, and by that much?
No wonder the sound of the waves had seemed farther away when she was becoming dizzy from the heat.
The water really had gone farther away.
Li Leyou desperately rolled and crawled toward the sea with every ounce of strength she had, but the consequences of dehydration finally hit her.
She had no strength left.
Her enormous tail wouldn’t move at all. It felt like a solid iron weight pressing against her body, drastically slowing her down and consuming the little strength she had remaining.
Lying helplessly on the scorching sand, Li Leyou weakly called out,
“Mo ye ka ha nie… Laomu…”
Although it felt loud enough in her own ears, the sound was barely louder than a mosquito’s buzz.
He probably really couldn’t hear her.
And even if he did, he might not come anyway.
This was bad.
She had really gone too far this time.
Early that morning, Laomu heard the call of the golden-tailed mermaid.
But he ignored it.
He had already made himself perfectly clear to her.
Her energetic calls continued for quite some time before finally stopping.
Laomu remained quietly inside his coral reef cave, staring intently at a cluster of sea anemones that had recently settled nearby.
It had a pink oral disc and hundreds of soft-looking, delicate tentacles layered around it. It resembled a kind of flower he had once seen on land.
The sea anemone had been waiting for a long time, but no suitable prey had passed by.
Laomu wasn’t surprised.
He often chased away the small fish and shrimp that came near his territory, so his home wasn’t a suitable place for a sea anemone to survive.
If it still couldn’t find food here after another couple of days, he would simply move it somewhere else himself.
Suddenly, another familiar call was caught by his exceptionally sensitive hearing.
It was her again.
But unlike her previous lively and powerful calls, this one was extremely faint, as though she no longer had any strength.
Laomu hesitated, but still didn’t move.
He waited for a while, but there was no second call.
Perhaps that first one had only been a hallucination caused by how thoroughly she had been getting on his nerves.
Suddenly, Anla’s head poked into his cave, blocking his view of the sea anemone.
“Laomu, that wandering mermaid is calling you again. She’s so annoying! Do you want me to go teach her a lesson?”
He said this excitedly.
His brother, who was melancholic when quiet and aggressive when active, immediately picked up a piece of coral reef and smashed it against Anla’s head.
Laomu still went.
But this time, he had already made up his mind.
He would have a fight with the golden-tailed mermaid and let her know that he wasn’t someone to be trifled with. He would also warn her again not to shout that strange phrase and not to disturb him like this anymore.
Following the direction of the voice he had heard earlier, Laomu arrived at a stretch of coastline.
What he saw was a golden fish tail lying stranded on the shore.
It seemed to have been exposed to the sun for a long time. Even the luster of its scales had become dull.
“A… ah…”
A soft, melodious chant came from the surface of the sea.
Li Leyou’s fingers, covered in sand, twitched.
She didn’t even have the strength to raise her head, but suddenly the sound of the waves beside her grew louder as something rapidly approached.
Crash!
A wave surged over her.
Cool seawater poured over her body and instantly wrapped her in its embrace.
The wave rushing onto the shore was like a hand, sweeping Li Leyou back into the sea.
The golden-tailed mermaid was tossed helplessly about by the current, completely motionless.
She looked almost dead.
Laomu watched her for a moment before approaching.
He discovered that she was severely dehydrated.
Her stomach was sunken as well, making it obvious that she hadn’t eaten properly for quite some time.
Normally, unless a mermaid was in extremely poor condition or encountered severe weather, it was difficult for one to become stranded on shore.
Mermaids were also among the most capable hunters in the ocean. Finding enough food to fill their stomachs was usually easy.
It was hard to imagine how one mermaid could have managed to make herself this miserable.
As Laomu examined her to check her condition, Li Leyou finally opened her eyes.
Her entire body felt like it was burning.
The seawater was cool.
Laomu’s hand was cool too.
He touched her stomach.
“Laomu…”
Li Leyou grabbed the hand he hadn’t yet pulled away.
Her body temperature was higher than that of an ordinary mermaid. Laomu had already noticed this when she hugged him before.
He didn’t like that heat.
Especially after she had spent so long under the sun, the temperature of her body had become even higher.
The excessive heat made Laomu uncomfortable and gave him an inexplicable sense of danger.
He tried to pull his hand away, but she was gripping it with almost all the strength in her body.
And she was crying.
Sobbing and trembling, she murmured indistinctly,
“Laomu… I want to go home.”
Laomu had been sensitive to emotions ever since he was young.
To him, emotions were like different scents. He could practically “smell” them.
After being captured and taken into the human world, the long period of danger and anxiety had made him even more sensitive to them.
Sensing other people’s emotions so easily meant that he could also be affected by them.
Laomu didn’t like that.
Fortunately, the emotions of his fellow mermaids were simple.
They were happy when they were full and playing. They became angry when they had conflicts.
Even so, Laomu still didn’t like being too close to his fellow族人.
But this wandering golden-tailed mermaid was different.
Her emotions were far too complicated, changed far too quickly, and were exceptionally intense.
Laomu found it difficult not to be affected by her.
At that moment, her sadness was so vivid that its scent seemed bitter to him, like a kind of fish that lived beneath the sandy seabed and that he had once tasted out of curiosity.
It had been bitter and astringent.
“Laomu, I want to go home.”
She wasn’t fully conscious. The only things she could say were that she wanted to go home and his name.
“…Can you no longer return to your own people?”
Laomu watched as she curled her tail inward in sadness, and for a moment, he seemed to see his younger self.
He too had once curled himself up inside a tiny fish tank, staring at the unfamiliar world outside while silently calling for his home and family.
The resonance of their emotions kept him from forcibly pulling Li Leyou’s hand away.
Instead, he even moved slightly closer to her.
“Where is your home? Can’t you find your way back? I can show you the way.”
Laomu spoke gently.
Li Leyou became a little more conscious.
Her tears mixed with the seawater.
“I can’t go back.”
Then it seemed that she really had been driven away from her族群 because she was different.
Laomu remained silent for a moment before saying,
“You can live in these waters. Our people won’t drive you away.”
Li Leyou could feel his attempt to comfort her.
This version of Laomu carried a faint shadow of the patient and gentle man she knew from the future.
“Waaah…”
Still upset, Li Leyou leaned toward him.
Her other hand naturally wrapped around the strong, lean waist of the mermaid, whose body was defined by powerful muscles and elegant lines.
Laomu:
“…”
“You can’t hug me like this.”
The moment he pulled Li Leyou away, she lost all her strength and sank toward the seabed.
She looked as though she would simply die there if no one bothered to help her.
After a moment, Laomu grabbed Li Leyou by the wrist and began swimming with her in a certain direction.
Because she had no strength left, Li Leyou didn’t even bother moving her tail.
She simply treated Laomu like a tow truck and herself like the vehicle being towed.
“Laomu, thank you. You’re so nice.”
She had sunk just now because she was starving.
After Laomu pulled her back up, he told her he would take her to catch some fish to eat.