The Three Life-Saving Pearls Given Away

It was Lu Shen.

He seemed to have gone mad. Without even taking off his clothes, he jumped straight from the cliff, more than thirty feet high, into the raging sea.

“Tang Huynh! Come back!”

He thrashed desperately among the towering waves, his eyes bloodshot, his shouts torn to shreds by the seawater.

On shore, Meng Tu and Pho Lam had gone completely mad too. They scrambled down over the rocks.

“Call the rescue team! Call them now!”

Meng Tu pulled out his phone, his fingers shaking so badly he couldn’t even swipe the screen.

The waves were too violent. Lu Shen had swum barely a dozen yards before a giant wave slammed him into the reef.

Blood immediately poured from his forehead, but he seemed not to feel it. He kept swimming with all his strength toward the place where I had disappeared.

“Huynh Huynh… I was wrong. Come back up!”

I hovered silently ten meters beneath the surface, watching him struggle in the whirlpool with cold detachment.

My mermaid’s eyes let me see the despair mingled with seawater and fresh blood on his face.

Just as another whirlpool was about to swallow him, the phone in his pocket suddenly rang, its specially waterproof casing lighting up.

The caller’s name appeared on the screen: Mengyu.

Even at the edge of life and death, the ringtone he had set for her was still grating.

Lu Shen instinctively reached for the phone. He hesitated for a split second.

That was all it took. A huge wave flipped him over completely, and he swallowed several mouthfuls of water.

I flicked my tail in contempt and swam deeper, unwilling to watch this belated performance for another second.

Half an hour later, the rescue team’s searchlights lit up the sea as brightly as day.

By the time they pulled Lu Shen into a rescue boat, he was barely conscious.

He was still clutching a scrap of fabric.

It was a piece of my pant leg.

Meng Tu and Pho Lam scrambled onto the boat. The three soaked men huddled around that scrap like lost souls.

“Officer, my sister is still down there. She turned… she turned into a fish! Please use sonar to find her!”

Meng Tu grabbed the rescue team leader by the collar and shouted incoherently.

The leader looked at him like he was insane and pried his hands away.

“Mr. Meng, please calm down! In weather like this, the chance of anyone surviving at sea is almost zero.”

“And turning into a fish? That’s a hallucination brought on by extreme stress.”

“It wasn’t a hallucination!”

Pho Lam suddenly jumped up, his eyes red as if they were bleeding.

“I saw it with my own eyes! She grew a fish’s tail!”

The rescue team leader shook his head and directed the others to continue searching.

Just then, Lin Mengyu called Meng Tu’s phone.

As soon as he answered, her weak, plaintive voice came through in tears.

“Brother Tu, why can’t I get through to Brother Shen?”

“I feel so awful. The doctor says if I can’t get the Heart-of-the-Sea Pearls, I might not survive the night… If Sister Tang doesn’t want to go, then forget it. I’ll just give her life back to her.”

A few hours earlier, those words would have been enough to make all three men frantic with concern, ready to force me into the sea at knifepoint.

But things were different now.

The veins on the back of Meng Tu’s hand bulged as he gripped the phone. He stared at the foam drifting across the sea, his teeth clenched.

“Brother Tu?”

The voice on the other end called cautiously.

“Get lost!”

Meng Tu suddenly roared and smashed the phone against the floor of the boat.

The screen shattered, and Lin Mengyu’s voice abruptly fell silent.

Beside him, Lu Shen began coughing violently and spat out a large mouthful of seawater.

He stared blankly at the scrap of fabric in his hand. At last, tears streamed down his face.

“She wasn’t lying to us… The clan’s rule is real.”

“We… we were the ones who forced her to her death.”

At last, on that rescue boat amid the raging storm, the three men felt the belated agony of being flayed alive.

The search lasted three days and three nights.

Other than a torn pair of my cloth shoes, they found nothing.

The police treated it as a missing-person case, but everyone understood: in a storm of that magnitude, someone who fell into the sea had almost no chance of survival.

Three days later, Lu Shen, Meng Tu, and Pho Lam returned to the villa.

They looked utterly drained, with unshaven faces and bloodshot eyes, shuffling through the door like wandering ghosts.

Lin Mengyu wore a simple white dress and leaned weakly against Jiang Xu, waiting for them in the living room.

When she saw them return, her eyes reddened and tears streamed down her face. She stumbled toward Lu Shen.

“Brother Shen, where have you all been? I was so scared.”

“Jiang Xu told me Sister Tang had an accident. It’s all my fault. If it weren’t for me, she wouldn’t have jumped into the sea…”

She skillfully laid all the blame on my supposed “suicide,” trying to stir their instinct to protect her.

Jiang Xu stood beside her too, wiping away her tears.