Free Web NovelThe sailors lowered enormous fishing nets from both sides of the ship while muttering strange prayers beneath their breath.
Bai Liu could only make out fragmented phrases like “the Siren King’s blessing.”
Jeff stood by the railing, staring down into the dark ocean below with an almost fanatical expression.
“They’re praying to the Siren King,” he murmured. “Praying for him to grant them beautiful merfolk.”
Before his words had fully faded, the sailors abruptly leapt overboard one after another, each clutching tightly to the hanging nets.
Lucy screamed in alarm.
“What are they doing?! Aren’t they supposed to be catching merfolk?! Why are they jumping in themselves?!”
Bai Liu’s expression remained calm. freeweɓnøvel.com
“They are catching merfolk.”
***
After a very long time, a giant fishing net slowly rose from beneath the sea.
Inside it were broken limbs and twisted fish tails.
More than a dozen merfolk were tangled inside the net in grotesque, mangled heaps—all of them dead.
Their rotting fish tails clung wetly to the mesh.
The corpses resembled discarded dolls thrown into a garbage pile, bent into impossible positions.
Even in death, their eyes remained wide open, staring fixedly at the people aboard the ship.
Their expressions were frozen in agony and terror.
Their bodies were covered in savage bite wounds, as though they had been torn apart by some monstrous deep-sea predator before being discarded into the net.
Under the searchlight’s beam, Bai Liu slowly examined the faces of the dead “merfolk.”
His breathing gradually stilled.
Every single face matched the missing tourists shown in the newspapers.
Around him, the sailors whispered excitedly among themselves.
“They’ll be turned into wax figures and sent to the museum...”
“But only four wax figures can leave the museum tonight. Only four tourists arrived this time. What do we do with the extra merfolk we salvaged?”
“Store them in the cargo hold for now.”
“We can satisfy our cravings first...”
The salvaged merfolk corpses were quickly carried away toward the rear of the ship.
No one knew where they were being taken.
***
Meanwhile, the three tourists—including Bai Liu—were served fresh sea fish that had supposedly been caught alongside the merfolk.
Before long, plates of sashimi and fish steaks were placed before them.
The fish carried a strange scent, as though tainted by proximity to the merfolk.
Once cooked, the smell became even eerier.
Except for Bai Liu, the others immediately began devouring the food greedily.
Lucy clutched a dripping fish head in both hands, chewing frantically.
She ate so quickly that strands of hair sticking to her cheeks were swallowed along with the meat.
Pulling oily hair from her mouth, Lucy smiled brightly at Bai Liu.
“Bai Liu, why aren’t you eating? Tonight’s fish is really fresh.”
The fish head in her hand stared lifelessly at Bai Liu with its tiny white eyes.
Andre gripped an entire fish tail in one hand while crunching noisily through bone and flesh.
He had already become almost completely fish-like.
His eyes had shifted to the sides of his face, nearly disappearing from the front altogether. His nose ⊛ Nоvеlιght ⊛ (Read the full story) had flattened, and foul-smelling saliva dripped continuously from his overly wide mouth.
Jeff sat silently carving open a fish belly with his fork.
He still appeared marginally sane, but his movements were becoming increasingly mechanical as he stuffed meat into his mouth faster and faster.
The sailors watched Bai Liu closely.
Then they forcibly shoved an entire plate of fish meat in front of him, smiling strangely.
“If you refuse the fresh fish gifted by the sailors,” one of them said softly, “this trip will have been meaningless, Mr. Bai.”
Bai Liu truly wanted to refuse.
But the system panel immediately appeared before him once again.
[Task Hint: If the player refuses to consume the fish gifted by the sailors, the “Salvage Observation” activity will be considered failed.]
Bai Liu fell silent for two seconds.
Then he picked up a piece and ate it.
***
The fish tasted sour and rotten the instant it entered his mouth.
But once it slid down his throat, the flavor transformed into the sweet freshness of perfectly normal seafood.
Suddenly, every plate on the table became irresistibly tempting.
Even someone like Bai Liu—someone who rarely possessed much appetite—felt an overwhelming urge to gorge himself on the feast before him.
Seeing that he had eaten, the sailors finally left, satisfied.
Bai Liu forced himself to remain clear-headed.
He deliberately turned away from the table and walked toward the edge of the ship to breathe the cold sea air.
Then he lowered his head and inhaled the metallic scent of the coin hanging against his chest.
The smell of money calmed him.
***
At this point, Bai Liu had already pieced together most of the truth.
After the Siren King had been salvaged from the sea, he fell into a deep sleep.
As a result, he lost some form of control over this region of ocean.
Anyone who died in these waters transformed into a merfolk—a grotesque “rebirth” that allowed the dead to return to the living world.
Originally, Bai Liu had assumed this was merely a local legend.
But the corpses of the twelve tourist-merfolk had already proven the story true.
People who died here genuinely became merfolk.
The real question was:
Why did such a tiny, isolated stretch of ocean produce so many merfolk?
Enough to fill the entire wax museum—and still continue appearing?
Where were all these dead people coming from?
The moment Bai Liu saw those salvaged tourist-merfolk, he finally understood.
Because this sea wasn’t a fishing ground.
It was a dumping site for corpses.
The bodies of missing tourists were likely thrown into this part of the ocean, transformed into merfolk after death, then salvaged by the sailors like oversized fish before being sealed inside wax statues.
The only remaining mystery was:
Who had killed the tourists?
Bai Liu already had a faint suspicion.
This town practically survived on robbery.
Most missing tourists in Siren Town also happened to lose their money before disappearing.
From the overwhelming number of theft and disappearance cases reported in the newspapers, Bai Liu had long realized that Siren Town was not inhabited by particularly honest people.
Rather than becoming wealthy through tourism—
the town had become wealthy through the criminal industry surrounding tourism.
After all, was there any easier target than travelers visiting from out of town?
In a place as rotten as this, where so many tourists had vanished, Bai Liu found it far more believable that the townspeople robbed and murdered tourists before dumping the bodies into the sea.
Of course, it was still possible that merfolk occasionally came ashore to hunt.
But considering their fear of strong light, daytime attacks seemed unlikely.
And during the busy tourist season at night, most merfolk were being salvaged and displayed as attractions.
The probability of them killing tourists directly wasn’t particularly high.
Then suddenly—
everything connected.
The merfolk salvage activity required someone to die in this sea in order for a “merfolk” to be caught.
No deaths meant no merfolk.
For example, the merfolk salvaged tonight were most likely the tourists who disappeared during the previous cycle.
Which meant—
the residents of Siren Town were probably murdering people intentionally and dumping the corpses into the sea in order to “breed” merfolk.
Then they used the spectacle of “merfolk salvage” as a tourist attraction to lure in even more victims.
No wonder the museum keeper had said that without tourists, there would be no merfolk salvage.
Because the salvaged merfolk were the tourists.
The Mayor truly was a man who “loved his people like his own children.”
To promote economic growth and conceal the townspeople’s crimes—to prevent those disappearances from ever being discovered and further expand the “merfolk tourism industry”—the Mayor would naturally preserve the salvaged corpses inside wax statues for the museum.
Or simply hand them over to the residents to deal with directly.
Naturally, the police would never recover any bodies.
Because the bodies themselves had already been sealed in wax.
***
The merfolk wax statues contained the corpses of former tourists.
The ghosts of those tourists remained trapped inside.
Driven by hatred and revenge, they began “incubating” the townspeople like a curse, turning the residents into their amulets.
During the alienation process, the residents slowly became fish-like creatures while the merfolk wax statues became increasingly human.
The two exchanged identities.
Which meant—
the warehouse filled with amulets below deck was actually packed with the residents of Siren Town.
And the sailors wandering this ship were the ghosts of those who had died at sea.
They were no longer human.
They were monsters.
***
But one piece was still missing.
The merfolk wax statues possessed three known forms:
Pupa.
Cocoon.
Butterfly.
Yet according to the natural laws of growth, there should have been one additional stage.
The earliest stage.
The weakest stage.
The larval stage.
And larvae were—
Bai Liu slowly pressed a hand against his stomach.
The piece of fish he had swallowed moments ago felt as though it were writhing slowly against the lining of his stomach.
He lowered his eyes toward his fingers.
Their color had begun fading into a pale greenish white.
Faint shimmering fish-scale patterns had appeared across his skin.
The sides of his jaw began itching violently, creating the illusion that gills were about to split open beneath the flesh.
Slowly, Bai Liu turned around.
The other three were still devouring fish greedily, almost completely stripped of their human appearances.
Especially Andre.
He was practically sprawled across the table, stuffing meat into his mouth like a starving beast.
His hair had hardened into bony spikes resembling dorsal fins, while dark green scales spread across the bridge of his nose.
[Warning: Player Bai Liu has entered an “Alienation” state.]
[Mental value decreasing.]
[Please carefully distinguish between game reality and hallucination.]
Bai Liu calmly reached a conclusion.
This was the final monster in the Monster Book.
The final form of the merfolk wax statues:
the larval state.
Every tourist who entered Siren Town—
and every resident who failed to leave—
would eventually be alienated into this weak, vulnerable form.
A form that could easily be robbed, slaughtered, and consumed by others.
And now, Bai Liu himself had become the weakest form of the merfolk wax statue.
The larva.
[“Siren Town Monster Book” Updated — Merfolk (4/4)]
[Monster Name: Merfolk (Larval State)]
[Weakness: ??? (Unexplored)]
[Attack Method: ??? (Unexplored)]
[All pages of the “Siren Town Monster Book” have now been unlocked.]
[Player may continue exploring incomplete monster information.]
Andre wiped rotten scraps of meat from the corners of his mouth before shoving the dining table aside.
His mouth had transformed into rows of dense, razor-sharp teeth.
The corners of his lips had split all the way down toward his chin, stretching grotesquely wide like a clown’s grin.
Bloody chunks of fish meat continued falling from his mouth as he spoke.
“Bai Liu,” Andre rasped, “you remember our bet, right?”
Bai Liu found himself strangely drawn toward the fishy scent radiating from Andre’s body.
Slowly, he blinked.
“I remember.”
“Spending the night on the boat.”
Andre’s grin widened hideously until it nearly reached the back of his head.
Then he extended an unnaturally long tongue and licked the remaining blood and meat from his face.
“Why don’t we spend the night,” he hissed softly, “right here?”
“In this sea full of merfolk.”
