The ray of light from his cell phone was set in that area and half a minute went by. The creature"s pupil that reflected the light was still just as motionless as before.
Rand couldn"t help but get closer.
He saw a fish.
"Phew..."
He breathed a sigh of relief.
It was indeed a fish— approximately ten centimeters long, right in a difficult situation, staying in a semi-dried up groove in the reef.
Rand has never come across this kind of fish before. It has a slender body and is colored a dull gray. It has a pointed head and has round eyes. Behind the eyes is a circular fluorescent pattern of the same size. The reflection Rand had seen just a moment ago came precisely from this pattern.
It looks like it"s just an ordinary fish.
Some fish had probably been brought here when the tide rose, and when the tide ebbed, it became stranded in there.
"Poor little thing."
Rand took out the fountain pen and tried to prod the fish out of the groove and throw it back into the sea. The fish struggled weakly, and Rand just then saw the scar on the other side of its body.
It resembled the mark of something biting down and tearing at its flesh, its blue blood rushes out of the bright red gash. Well, Rand must admit that this ordinary fish seems to be not too ordinary. After all, he has never seen a fish with scarlet red muscle tissue like humans and fluorescent blue blood.
But there is no denying that things in the deep sea are always a bit strange after all. After his first initial astonishment, Rand did not care about its bizarre blood and flesh. He was just somewhat hesitant about whether he should return the fish to the sea or not. It has very clearly sustained a serious injury on its body, and even if it returned to the sea, it was highly probable for it to be hunted by predators. Then staying here? After the high tide, it could still be flooded out by seawater.
It was as if his mind was being occupied by some strange emotional state.
His inexplicably decided to bring the fish back with him until the fish"s wound healed over and then put it back into the sea again.
After his initial hesitation, Rand sacrificed his own sports water bottle and forced the fish to go in.
Of course, the process is not going well. The pen is not a good tool for dealing with a fish. After observing with difficulty that the fish had no teeth in its mouth, Rand had no choice but to grab the fish with his bare hands— and uncomfortably, after coming into contact with Rand"s hand, something inside its lips ejected out like a sucker and attached to the wound on Rand"s palm. Even more frightening is that Rand almost did not notice this thing until he was about ready to put the fish in the bottle only to find that the fish was unable to come off of his hand, it was only then that he found that d.a.m.ned sucker.
After separating himself from the sucker, the place where the cut on the palm of his hand was only a dim raised white line, all traces of blood were gone.
Rand felt somewhat disgusted, but the darkness of the sky and the clamor of the waves make him too distracted to worry too much about it.
He endured the urge to throw the fish back into the sea, Rand eventually returned to dry land with the strange fish.
As a dazzling red sports car starts up and begins driving to the city at the same moment, let us turn the camera back to the reef where Rand has been staying.
Beneath the reef, the high tides of the sea crashing into the reef caused an intense current.
In the depths under the water, a rock is loosened, and it seems as if something in the black aquatic gra.s.ses slowly comes off.
A deathly pale corpse gently sways under the impact of the current, its figure appeared exceptionally strong and its facial features were handsome, but from its abdomen down, it wasn"t connected to a human pair of legs... In that place, there was only one thick and solid fishtail.
"Beep—"
Inside the car, Rand heard his cell phone go off as he was driving his car.
He glanced at the caller ID and Vincent"s name was flashing about.
A faint shadow rose on Rand"s cheek, but after a moment of pause, he ultimately still picked up the phone.
"Rand, where are you?"
Ice-cold, just like the mechanical voice that comes out from the other end of the receiver.
"I... just gathered some news and started to get ready to go home."
Rand tried not to let his voice have any undulations.
"The place you went to today was the Blue Moon Coast."
On the other end, Vincent looked at the information in his hands, his beautiful face full of frost. The security guard in black involuntarily looked in his direction and broke out in a cold sweat.
"Did you follow me again?"
Rather than saying that Rand"s voice was full of anger, it would be more accurate to say it was full of fatigue.
Vincent did not even answer his question.
"Leave the Blue Moon Coast, I will send someone to pick you up right away."
"Hey, I have already left, you don"t need—"
Rand heard the busy signal on the other end of the phone, sighed deeply, then angrily slammed his cell phone onto the pa.s.senger seat.
He still drove the car just as before, immersed in his emotions, he naturally does not notice that on the highway that connects the Blue Moon Coast with the surrounding cities, there is no one vehicle coming or going except for his own car.
Blue Moon Coast—
The body of the mermaid was fished out by taciturn military personnel.
The extremely bright portable spotlight illuminates the surface of the reef that is covered with a blue water-repellent cloth. The corpse that rests on top of it is bathed in white light.
The researcher had an ashen complexion as he stretched out his plastic gloved hand and turned the merman over. He brushed away the thick strands of seaweed toward the other side and then gasped a mouthful of chilly air.
"This..."
Another person came over and looked at the thing"s appearance under the light, and his body shuddered.
There is a wound on the back of the merman"s skull. No, this description is too inaccurate.
To be precise, the rear side of the merman"s skull is split open.
Just like the husk of a ripened nut split in half, the merman"s skull was smoothly split open in a long and narrow crack.
There was no sign of blood, no brains spilling out everywhere, the crack was abnormally clean.
"Oh, don"t tell me this is true... G.o.d, ah... it broke right through the sh.e.l.l..."
The one behind him stumbled back two steps, as if the corpse in front of him would come back to life, and was frightened into falling onto the floor.
"Calm down a little Steve," the researchers wrinkled his brows and spoke. If not for his voice being too rough, it would appear that even he was calm, "No, it"s not a broken sh.e.l.l."
He suddenly pried open the merman"s skull with his hand— Theoretically, an extremely hard skull should be pried open very effortlessly, just like an eggsh.e.l.l.
Something that had been left inside the skull was revealed, a pale yellow fetal sac, and if it was full, it should be the size of a fist as well as the remaining half of the body in the fetal sac.
Gray slender body, circular pattern.
If Rand was here, he should be able to see at a glance that this thing is almost exactly the same as the one in his water bottle. The only difference is that the thing that appears before the eyes of the researchers only has the skin present, the bright red flesh, and blue blood is nowhere to be found.
The researchers" complexions went as gray as the dead.
"The parasitic eggs that we left in the body of the Experimental Body No. 7371 have not hatched. On the contrary, after Experimental Subject 7371 devoured the parasitic egg, it escaped by changing into the larval body."
"Devouring? That"s impossible, that project has never once been successful... "
The coward, known as Steve, began to speak in a panic. He didn"t want to no matter what, or to say, he didn"t dare to imagine it all."
"Go report it," the researcher looked at Steve in extreme despair. "We have let the world"s most sinister and powerful creation come to the human world."
(TN: Next chapter will be up today too. Because it"s like short, super short. Like I didn"t even have to scroll the page down to read the entire thing short. Anyways I got some more help from Cheonsa_I_BL and updated the novelupdates page, so there will be an updated summary on Wattpad too complete with warnings and some more tags.)