Chapter 42
Chapter 42
Having violated the visitor rules, Chu Yanran felt her mind reel. The scene before her slowly began to change.
It seemed her old lover had returned.
She saw Chen Fei smiling at her in the sunshine.
Dazed, Chu Yanran raised a hand to touch her lover’s face. “Feifei… I think I’ve had a very, very long nightmare…”
Rrrip…
The sound of tearing flesh made Lin Yinxi’s teeth ache.
The merman sank his teeth viciously into Chu Yanran’s shoulder. The hands that had seemed about to embrace her pierced through her side, between her ribs.
“Aaagh…” With her lung injured, Chu Yanran spat out a mouthful of blood and began convulsing violently.
“Chu Yanran!” Xu Haitang, who had been knocked aside, stared in anguish, her voice breaking out of control.
Lin Yinxi clung to the metal support. The icy red water pouring over her chilled her to the heart.
She looked at the frenzied merman and drew a deep breath.
Fighting that dark-skinned merman barehanded would just make her his next meal.
Lin Yinxi gripped the support with one hand and, with enormous difficulty, dug her phone out of her pocket with the other.
She needed to call in backup.
Entity backup, to be precise.
The phone seemed to be waterproof too. All that water had left it completely unaffected. It still worked.
She opened the group chat and typed one-handed beneath her distinguished title, [Rabbit 009 (Socially Anxious Edition)].
After ten years online, her fingers moved in a blur.
[Rabbit 009 (Socially Anxious Edition): @Fishhead Supervisor The new exhibit E-77 in Whale Shark Hall is showing severe aggressive and self-harming tendencies. He has smashed the transfer tank and is damaging the hall’s property.
I request that the security team be dispatched immediately to retrieve him. Otherwise, at best, this will delay work. At worst, the merman may die of dehydration.]
The Fishhead Supervisor replied the instant the message went out.
[Fishhead Supervisor: Nothing must happen to that merman. The riot-control security team is already on its way. You must stay where you are and must not harm the merman.]
She wasn’t the one hurting the merman.
The merman might bite her head off.
Help would take time to arrive.
Lin Yinxi looked around. The machinery jamming had burst a pipe earlier, and a broken section was spraying highly concentrated blue sedative solution.
She couldn’t touch that water with her hands.
The blue water would mutate a normal human.
Taking a deep breath, she grabbed a steel pipe that had washed up nearby. Carefully, she used it to prod the pipe spraying blue solution, aiming the spray at the merman’s body.
“Let go! That’s your girlfriend!”
The high-pressure jet of blue water washed over the merman’s tail, carrying a powerful sedative effect.
As the blue water struck him, the voice that had been speaking so tenderly from within his body changed to a shriek of pain.
His frenzied biting slowed accordingly.
He instinctively released Chu Yanran.
Just then, the iron door backstage in Whale Shark Hall was brutally kicked open.
Several security entities rushed in, their bodies covered in hard barnacles beneath heavy diving suits. They carried metal nets charged with high-voltage electricity and enormous steel forks.
Lin Yinxi made herself as inconspicuous as possible.
She moved aside.
The guards pinned the sedated merman with their steel forks, then scooped him up in a metal net and flung him into the enormous, undamaged display tank nearby.
Splash!
With the sound of splashing water, the red water on the floor vanished, as if everything that had just happened were an illusion. Apart from broken glass, the floor was dry, without a trace of water.
The visitor rules.
[If you see the water inside an aquarium tank turn red, immediately close your eyes and turn your back to the tank. Do not leave until you hear a splash.]
Chen Fei fell into the water and swayed his enormous, injured tail. The blue water slowly repaired his wounded body. He grew quiet and hid deeper in the water.
How nice it must be to become an entity.
No pain. No guilt.
With the crisis resolved, the security team quickly left.
Forcing her body to move, Xu Haitang scrambled over to Chu Yanran and pressed both hands over the wound on her neck.
The intense pain briefly brought Chu Yanran back to her senses.
Lin Yinxi hurried over too.
“Hold on… I’ll think of something. There has to be a way…” After so many partings and deaths, Xu Haitang hadn’t felt the urge to cry in a long time. Now, though, she couldn’t stop her eyes from reddening.
Xu Haitang had helped many vulnerable newcomers in previous scenarios.
This was the only time a newcomer had saved her life in return.
“Haitang… don’t waste your strength…” Chu Yanran’s face was deathly pale. Her skin began to mutate, its pores gradually disappearing.
The merman’s teeth were venomous. Gray-blue fish scales crept visibly up her neck.
She had broken the rules and looked directly at an exhibit. The double contamination of mind and body was already irreversible.
With difficulty, Chu Yanran turned her head toward Lin Yinxi, who stood beside her.
“Linlin… Haitang… please… do one last thing for me…”
Trembling, Chu Yanran raised the hand that had already grown webbing and pointed at the enormous, eerily blue tank beside them.
“Put me… in the water… I want to become a fish and swim to the person I love…”
She struggled for breath. A clear tear slid from the corner of her eye.
Girls were made of water, with hearts so soft and tears that could never seem to run dry.
“Chu Yanran! Don’t act on emotion! If you go in there, you’ll become an entity completely!” Xu Haitang gritted her teeth. Rational as she was, she still wanted to find a way to remove the contamination.
“I can’t… leave anymore…” Chu Yanran clutched the hem of Xu Haitang’s clothes. “Haitang… please let me have this…”
“All right.” Lin Yinxi agreed.
Lin Yinxi stepped forward and lifted one of Chu Yanran’s arms onto her shoulder.
She looked at Xu Haitang. “Haitang, even if we could find a rule to remove her contamination, there’s nothing we can do to treat the fatal wound on her neck. Let’s grant her wish.”
She could become remains rotting on the floor.
Or she could become a fish that could stay beside her lover in the water.
In this hopeless contaminated zone, the latter had somehow become a happiness too precious to hope for.
Xu Haitang’s eyes held a tangle of emotions. She opened her mouth, but in the end said nothing. Silently, she chose to support Chu Yanran’s other side.
The two of them helped Chu Yanran, dying from severe blood loss, walk step by step toward the large tank in the exhibition hall.
They climbed the stairs and reached the edge of the tank.
Looking at the deep blue water below, Chu Yanran smiled in relief.
“Feifei…” She called her lover’s name.
Lin Yinxi and Xu Haitang let go.
Splash…
Chu Yanran’s body fell into the icy blue water of the aquarium tank.
Almost the instant she entered the water, her clothes dissolved. Her legs quickly fused and sprouted brilliant scales.
Chen Fei swam up from the bottom. Reaching out his strong arms, he caught the sinking Chu Yanran and dived deeper into the tank.
The phone in Lin Yinxi’s pocket vibrated.
[Work notification: The new merman has been successfully guided into the large tank and is stable. Job complete.]
[Pay settlement: 800 Rabbit Coins have been transferred to your account.]
Lin Yinxi glanced at her balance.
[Balance: 1,475 Rabbit Coins.]
That should be enough for a ticket, right?
If even this wasn’t enough, that vehicle could only be a damn unlicensed rip-off.
“Haitang, the job’s done and we’ve been paid. Let’s go.”
Lin Yinxi turned to Xu Haitang, who was swaying beside her, and hurried to support her.
“Haitang, are you all right? Do you need somewhere to rest first? Yang Shu and I have found the route to Zone C. We can leave!”