Chapter 6: The Three Life-Saving Pearls Were Given to Someone Else

If they were so fond of using other people’s lives to make themselves beautiful, then let them rot slowly in the filthiest place imaginable.

After they dealt with those two pieces of trash, the three men completely fell apart.

They moved out of the villa and put up a makeshift tent by the cliff.

Day after day, year after year, they kept watch by the shore.

At the slightest disturbance on the water, they would plunge in like rabid dogs.

One night, thick fog blanketed the sea.

Lục Thâm sat on a reef, his hand clamped around a bloodstained scale.

Then he heard a clear, ethereal song rising from the water.

It was a mermaid’s song.

Lục Thâm sprang to his feet and stumbled forward. One foot missed its mark, and he crashed into the freezing sea.

“Huỳnh Huỳnh! Is that you? Huỳnh Huỳnh!”

He thrashed wildly, swallowing mouthful after mouthful of seawater as his consciousness began to fade.

Just as he was about to sink to the ocean floor, a silvery-blue tail drew a graceful arc through the water.

I swam through the depths, coldly watching the man drowning before me.

His eyes were bloodshot. The moment he saw me, a fierce will to live flared in them.

He reached out, trying to grab me.

I stopped in front of him, looking at him as if he were nothing more than a lifeless stone.

We had once been husband and wife. I didn’t want his corpse fouling my waters.

With a sweep of my tail, I sent a surge of water crashing into him and pushed him toward the surface.

Then I turned away and dove deeper into the darkness.

The waves carried Lục Thâm onto the sand. He woke coughing violently.

He clawed at the beach and wailed toward the sea.

“I saw her… She isn’t dead! She’s really still down there!”

Three years later.

Lục Thâm had bought the cliff and built a towering white lighthouse there.

Night after night, its beam shone toward the deep sea, as if guiding someone home.

Mạnh Tự and Phó Lâm had also given up their lives on land. Like ascetics, all three kept watch there year-round.

Their hair had gone half gray. They looked haggard and worn.

Another full moon rose.

The oldest woman in the family leaned on her cane and slowly made her way to the foot of the lighthouse.

The three men looked at her as if she were their last hope, then fell to their knees together.

“Please, Grandmother, tell us what we have to do to turn her back!”

“We’ll give any amount of blood, any number of lives—anything, as long as she comes back!”

Mạnh Tự slammed his forehead against the hard reef. Blood streamed down his face.

The old woman looked at the three men who had brought this disaster upon themselves and shook her head. Her cloudy eyes held both pity and scorn.

“It’s too late. You’ve made a terrible mess of things.”

“Once a tidecaller enters the sea and becomes a creature of the deep, she is no longer human.”

She paused. Her voice, carried on the sea wind, was utterly merciless.

“Mermaids have no human feelings.”

“The moment her legs became a tail, the seawater washed away every memory, every love and hatred she had for the land.”

“Now she is a child of the Sea God. She will never remember any of you.”

Her words struck all three men like a rusted knife plunging into their hearts, then twisting deeper.

“No… That can’t be…”

Lục Thâm crumpled to the ground, his eyes vacant.

“She loved me so much. How could she forget me? Before, I only had to furrow my brow and she’d worry about me for half the day…”

Phó Lâm bit down so hard his lip bled.

“Then we’ll go into the sea and find her! We’ll make her fall in love with us again!”

The old woman gave a cold laugh.

“The Sea God punishes everyone who betrays a tidecaller. You think you can still get near her?”

As if to prove her point, the calm sea suddenly churned.

Beneath the moonlight, I broke through the surface and sat on a reef a hundred meters from them.

My silvery-blue scales glittered in the moonlight. My long hair spilled across my pale shoulders like seaweed.

I was beautiful—so breathtakingly beautiful it left people speechless, yet cold enough to chill them to the bone.

“Huỳnh Huỳnh!”

All three men cried out in anguish and charged toward the sea.

The instant they stepped into the water, an invisible wall hurled them back.

The Sea God was driving them away.

They could only stand on shore, watching me in despair.

I tilted my head and looked at the three men sobbing on the beach, utterly wretched.

My mind was completely blank.

Who were they? Why were they crying at me?

I tilted my head. They were starting to bore me.

Lục Thâm knelt in the sand and reached out in desperation, tears and snot streaking his face.

“Huỳnh Huỳnh, I was wrong… Look at me. It’s me, A Thâm!”

Mạnh Tự slapped himself, sobbing as if his heart were breaking.

“Little sister, please… Come home with me, okay?”

Phó Lâm lay facedown in the water, like a child who had lost his way.

I looked at them. These humans were so noisy.