Chapter 33: Beneath the Water
The deep sea, forever covered with a veil of mystery in the eyes of the land-based races, is like a dense fog outside the labyrinth, making it impossible to see through. When the sea is calm, perhaps the undercurrent in the sea is surging wildly, and when the sea is stormy and the waves are raging, the underwater world is often quiet without waves.
Compared to the surface of the sea, the deep sea is like another world. There are no four seasons here, there is no sun and moon hanging high in the sky, there is no disturbing rain, snow and storms here, many things that people are accustomed to when they are on land will not appear at the bottom of the sea.
However, there is no loneliness under the deep sea, it is completely different from what people think, there is light, a dark light. Along the land at the bottom of the sea, countless towering coral trees rise from the ground, and the coral trees are home to an abundance of algae plants that emit a shimmer in the darkness. Huge chunks of seaweed are connected together, looking like stars in the night sky from a distance, bringing hopeful light to the dark ocean floor.
With the light of phosphorus algae, you can see the environment in the deep sea faintly. The dark waters filled all the surrounding spaces, and like the air on land, everything was contained in the water. The ground beneath his feet is a delicate grain of sand, which should be golden yellow and looks faintly blue-black in the light of phosphoalgae, which looks particularly gloomy.
On the sandy ground, coral trees stand like a coral forest, and thousands of tiny marine fish pass through the crevices and holes of the coral trees, competing to feed on the deep-sea plants that depend on the corals. As if disturbed, the small fish that were feeding fled in fear and burrowed into the coral crevices, their protruding eyes peering out from the cracks.
It looks calm, but if you look closely, you can see that there is a protrusion in the fine sand at the bottom of the sea, which is constantly sliding forward in the sand, lurking under the sand and slowly approaching a coral tree. Under the coral tree, the fine sand suddenly parted in all directions, revealing a strange creature more than half a meter long. It also looks like a fish, more than half a meter long and wide, and looks like a ball that has been flattened, with only a slight convex center of the body. In the raised position, there are two eyes side by side, but these two eyes are protruding straight upwards, and the black pupils can rotate freely in the eyes, and when the body is attached to the ground, the rotating pupils can be used to observe everything around them in all directions without dead ends. Its mouth grows directly below its body, and it usually closes and shrinks into a hole, but when it eats, it can freely change its size and shape by relying on the expansion and contraction of its muscles.
This unknown fish drilled out of the fine sand on the bottom of the sea, slowly floated upward, attached to the coral tree with the bottom of its body, opened its mouth, changed the shape according to the hole in the coral tree, completely sealed the hole, and then sucked it hard, the small fish hiding in the hole could not resist this suction force at all, and was involuntarily sucked out of the gap and became a delicacy in the other party's mouth. After replacing a dozen holes and crevices in a row, the flat fish was finally full, but it didn't know that the danger was coming.
Normally, the Flat Fish has a field of view that includes all angles, and enemies from any direction cannot escape its observation, it can detect enemies before they arrive, and then burrow back into the sand to hide. And his only weakness is that when he is attached to the tree to eat, his belly is attached to the coral tree, which means that he can only see half of the direction of the sea, and the half of his abdomen has become a blind spot, and this attack is from the direction of the blind spot.
In the dim light of the phosphoalgae, the jungle formed by the coral trees was calm, and there were no moving creatures except for the flat fish that were hunting, just like a picture scroll. But suddenly, two white spots appeared on another coral tree, no, not white spots but two miserable white eyes. On the coral tree, there is a long and narrow fish, with a total length of nearly two meters, and its skin has the same color and texture as the coral tree. The reef fish has a strong and powerful tail, and when it flicks in the water, its streamlined, narrow body shoots forward like an arrow, and its pointed head breaks through the resistance of the sea water and stabs at the abdomen of the flat fish exposed outside the coral tree. Although it could not be seen by the eye, the fluctuating current made the flatfish feel dangerous, and quickly broke away from the attached coral tree and fled towards the fine sand of the seabed, but its speed was not comparable to that of the coral-like narrow fish, and it was shot through the body by the hard head of the narrow fish halfway through the body, and the eyes quickly lost its vitality.
The long-and-narrow fish hunted successfully, writhing its body and preparing to eat, when the fine sand on the bottom of the sea suddenly rose, making the water cloudy. In the cloud, a large mouth full of sharp teeth emerged from the sand, biting the flat fish and the narrow fish at the same time, although the narrow fish struggled in panic, it could not break free from the huge mouth about the size of its head, and was soon bitten off its head, and its broken body floated in the sea.
The fine sand flies in all directions with the flow of the sea, and when the dust falls, a huge body five or six meters long appears on the bottom of the sea. The creature was also flat-shaped, clinging to the bottom of the ocean like a legless lizard, with a large mouth at the front of its body that did not match its size, and sharp teeth in its mouth full of intimidation. The creature's back has a thick stratum corneum, and the stratum corneum is densely covered with a large number of pores, making the scalp tingle when you look at it. It opened its mouth very leisurely, and its sharp teeth were like guillotines, easily cutting a large piece from the carcass of two prey, and swallowing it without hindrance. Dark red, cold blood gushed from the corpse's wounds, drenching the world under the sea in blood.
Something surprising happened. As the huge mouth devoured the large pieces of cut corpses, the fine scraps of meat on the corpses also fluttered around, and thousands of small fish that had been hiding in the cracks of the coral trees seemed to have received some instructions, and poured out of the nest, not shying away from the predators at all to share these scattered meat crumbs, and the fish kept passing by the mouths of the big fish, but the big fish did not look at them.
Soon, the big fish finished feeding, and the small fish finished their feeding. The small fish did not return to the crevices of the coral trees, but went directly into the dense hollows on the backs of the big fish. Having gathered away the bait of its prey, the big fish sank to the bottom of the sea contentedly, and began to rest motionlessly, and the bottom of the sea returned to its original calm, as if nothing had happened.
There is no day or night in the underwater world, and time is frozen here, and everything remains the same. I don't know how long it took, maybe a minute, maybe an hour, maybe a day, the body of the big fish that sank to the bottom of the sea suddenly shook, and the two pairs of spit out eyes above the giant mouth reappeared with vitality. The pupils in his eyes stared at the water above for a while, as if he suddenly sensed fear, and twisted his body to quickly burrow into the coral tree jungle, and soon disappeared into the darkness that phosphorus algae could not illuminate, and there was no longer a shadow to be seen.
Soon after the big fish disappeared, several humanoid figures broke through the sea and dived towards the bottom of the sea. The six-armed Naga Lamia, who dragged the long snake tail, swam in the front, and the four girls each grabbed the snake tail with both hands and were led forward by Lamia. Half behind Lamia, the mermaid princess Lanna took Pannis's hand and followed closely. Princess Huguang seems to have decided that Pannis is her father, even if she doesn't have a similar identity, no matter how Pannis argues, it is useless, the whole process is like a little girl who is with her father for the first time, constantly swimming around Pannis, up and down, left and right, and must personally take Pannis's hand forward, not caring at all about the strange and wary eyes of Lina Catherine and Vivien.
However, during this two-day silent journey, several girls were also accustomed to Lanna's behavior, and the princess of the mermaid clan seemed to be just coquettish to her father in her own way, and had no other intentions, so now the vigilance in the girls' eyes has disappeared, replaced by double ridicule and banter, of course, against Pannis.
Seven people descended from the sea and rushed straight to the bottom of the sea, Lana with the fishtail and Lamia with the snake tail stood firm at the bottom of the sea and stopped, but the five members of the adventure group floated in the water like floats, unable to touch the ground. The only difference between the five of them and the sea is that they each wear a thin collar around their necks, which are inlaid with several smooth white pearls, and a pendant made of spar hangs at the end, which is just fixed under each person's Adam's apple.
"Transform your form, as you practiced on the sea. Lamia, though still serious, raised her eyebrows slightly to express her amusement at the five men's pretending to be floating objects. But the girls did not have time to pay attention to Lamia's rare behavior, because they reacted in surprise that they actually heard a voice, and heard it at a depth of more than 2,000 meters.
Lamia's voice was different from that of the land, it was low and hoarse in the water, and her lips did not open or close at all, and the voice became directly from her throat.
Although surprised, the girls changed the form of the amphibious beads according to Lamia's instructions. In their senses, it was still as if they had lost most of their resistance, and they fell to the fine sand of the ocean floor under the action of gravity, and the feeling of being in the water at this time was like falling into a ball of viscous air, which was indescribably strange.
"Father...... Didn't Mr. Pannis tell you?" Lan Na also expressed surprise at the girls' surprise. Lan Na in the water, her voice is less charming on land, but it is a little more magnetic and charming because of its low voice. The mermaid princess's eyes widened, and she asked in surprise, "I thought he had already told you, so I didn't explain to you how to use this collar." It allows you to hear us. (To be continued.) )