Chapter 1: Mermaid Lord

“Level one alert!!”

“Quick! Quick, turn!!”

Panicked sailors ran across the deck, pulling the sails hard to the left.

In the captain’s cabin, a white-bearded old man in a flat naval cap forcefully threw down his binoculars, suppressing his anger as he berated the first mate: “You’re an old hand who’s been sailing for twenty years, how could you still make such a low-level mistake!!”

The first mate’s face still bore the red flush of a hangover, but his clothes were already soaked through with cold sweat.

“I’m sorry… I was too careless, I didn’t even notice a monster like a Urick on our route!!”

The old captain looked at his first mate with disappointment and shook his head: “If anything happens today, you can go to hell and apologize to the brothers on this ship!”

The first mate wanted to say something more, but was interrupted by the violent shaking of the ship.
This ebony wood ship, which had weathered countless storms at sea, was shaking violently at an unbelievable frequency, as if something was swinging it back and forth like a toy.

“!!
It’s a Urick!!
We went the wrong way!!”
The first mate’s hand gripped the cabin’s railing tightly, desperately trying to get outside.
“No, I have to go stop them from moving forward!”

The old captain, who had fallen to the ground, had his neat beard and hair in disarray.
He sighed deeply: “It’s useless, it’s too late.”

“How could this be…” The first mate’s face was ashen, as if he had lost all his strength.

“Have you forgotten?”
The old captain looked at him with pity, “Uricks are social creatures, they know no fear, and they never let go of any food.”

As he spoke, several long, slimy tentacles had already latched onto the side of the ship, and a huge, square head loomed faintly within sight.
The head was a ghastly green color, densely embedded with dozens of pairs of eyes.

“It’s all my fault!!!”

The first mate’s heart trembled, and he clutched his head in despair, trying to smash it against the ship’s planks.

“Don’t go crazy just yet!
We still have one chance.”

“What… is it?
Please tell me!”

The old captain’s gaze was deep as he pointed to the sea chart hanging on the wall.

“We’re very close to that place, aren’t we?”

The first mate eagerly looked at the place he was pointing to, then stared back at the old captain’s face as if stupefied, trying to find any trace of a joke.

“The Sea… of Death?”
He swallowed a mouthful of saliva.

The Sea of Death,

Was a desolate sea area said to be cursed by the sea god, where no living creature could survive.
Even brainless mayflies would not approach that place.

[There, life is cut off]
[There, there is no magic]
[There, curses are everywhere]

These were the lines written by the seahorse bard Kórbinos, the most creative in the sea, after a night of drinking, and they have been sung throughout all the seas.

There were also adventurous sea folk who had gone to explore, and all of them returned to their clans with festering wounds.
Even the most skilled sea doctors could not heal these wounds, and they could only die in agony—

This was a cursed land.

Every sea folk believed so.

When a newborn sea folk child became sensible, its guardian would first warn it—do not approach the Sea of Death, there is no return from there, it is a place of certain death.

Some guardians would even scare naughty children by saying “if you don’t behave, I’ll throw you into that dead sea.”

But, were there really no living things there?

No.

Of course there were.

It’s just that they were all at the deepest part of the seabed.

Intruding creatures would be cursed and couldn’t reach that depth.

Sykes thought this, slapping his tail against the rock beneath him.

If another sea folk were here at this moment, it would surely be amazed by what it saw—

That’s right, this was actually a rare, precious, and rumored-to-be-extinct merman!

This rare merman had silvery, sparkling hair, and a pair of golden, shining eyes, and a beautiful face that was ten thousand times more radiant than them.

Further down were a fair neck, a smooth back, and a lean waist.

And finally, the tail.

It had a tail so white it was almost transparent, with scales like the most beautiful gems in a human palace, shimmering with a captivating luster.
The translucent tail fin opened up like a fan, refracting colorful light in the sunlight.

Like a peerless treasure buried at the bottom of the sea, or a pearl accidentally lost by the sea god in the mortal world, this merman looked incredibly precious and exquisitely delicate.

But if you only regarded him as a treasure that could be possessed at will, you would be greatly mistaken.

The demons of the Sea of Death could testify to this.

Five hundred years ago, it was this detestable merman who forcibly seized their territory and unreasonably hunted them down until their numbers were reduced by ninety percent, forced to live in the darkest crevices of the seabed.

This showed that this merman was not just outstandingly beautiful—

He was also a powerful warrior.

He called himself the Lord of the Sea of Death—Merman Sykes.

For five hundred years, Sykes had developed the good habit of patrolling his territory once a day.

Although the name of this Sea of Death was known throughout the underwater world, and few little guys who courted death would wander in, making patrolling completely unnecessary, but…

He had rested enough and leaped down from the reef of the isolated island.

The seawater was a clear azure, and with the movement of his fishtail, waves rippled one after another.
Beneath the water’s surface, it was empty at a glance, with not even the most basic sea creatures present.

But this stretch of water was too boring; he had to find something to do.

Just then, Sykes’s ears twitched, and the translucent fins on the outer layer of his ears trembled a few times.
Did he hear something?
A human ship?

The merman was clearly happy, and with a flick of his tail, he swam towards the direction of the sound.

It wasn’t that Sykes was particularly fond of humans, but humans were always a race that repaid kindness.

After easily dispatching a few big-headed beasts (humans seemed to call them Uricks?) surrounding the ship, Sykes received a chorus of thanks and praise from the humans on board.
The first mate, who had nearly caused a disaster, was the one who lavished the most frequent and sincere praise.

But the merman didn’t care about these things.
He had endured the ugliness of the big-headed beasts to help, not for some flimsy praise.

Sykes waited in place for a while, but seeing no expected tribute, his tail slowly slapped the water, the force growing stronger and stronger, until the splashes were almost as high as the deck.

The humans singing praises on the deck were drenched to the bone, looking at each other in confusion, not knowing what had happened.
How could the merman who had just saved them get angry in such a short time?

The well-traveled old captain suddenly remembered a story his captain had told him when he was still a sailor.
So he hobbled back to the captain’s cabin on his cane and tremblingly brought out a chest.

“Respected Merman Lord.”

He emptied the contents of the chest onto the ground, letting the merman choose, “Thank you for your rescue.
We are willing to offer all our books and treasures as a grateful reward.”

Sykes emerged from the water and, seeing that the amount of things was sufficient, with a wave of his hand, all the treasures and books disappeared.

Watching the merman’s receding figure, the old captain told the crew around him in a heartfelt tone—

“It is said that the most powerful creature in the Sea of Death will accept trades with humans.
You only need to prepare enough [knowledge] and sufficiently novel treasures to receive his help.”

With his unexpected gains, Sykes hastily concluded this month’s patrol and returned to his dwelling.

His house was located in the depths of the seabed, where the water was pitch black, the sunlight firmly blocked in the shallow water, and everything at the bottom of the sea inexplicably had a dark and terrifying quality.

The merman’s house was especially so.

The place where the merman lived was less a house and more a tower, with a pointed top and dozens of floors of rooms.

It was pitch black on the outside and gloomy on the inside, looking very much like the mages’ towers on land—this was a side effect of Sykes’s studies on the human continent in his youth.

He absolutely loved the design and practicality of the mage’s tower, which was very suitable for all kinds of research.
So when he left the continent, he took enough materials with him and painstakingly built a mage’s tower on the seabed.

Don’t ask how he brought so many things back; you must know that knowledge is omnipotent.

Sykes came to his room at the top of the tower and poured the things out from his storage space.
He had indeed sensed that among these miscellaneous items, there must be new knowledge that he loved.

Not this one, not this one, and not this one either…

Cups of pure gold studded with gems, pearls the size of fists, and shining glass mirrors were ruthlessly thrown to the ground, rolling far away.

Humans always liked such shiny but useless things.
Sykes heard the noise and spared them a sliver of his attention.

Most humans possessed such precious wealth of knowledge without realizing it, and were instead more interested in such garbage.

Sykes, at any rate, could not understand this at all.
From the day he hatched from his shell, he already understood his purpose in this world—to learn.

He had always loved knowledge, from books to life to the experience of his predecessors.
As a merman born a warrior, he was crazy about the things of scholars.

When his peers skipped classes to go to the training grounds, he was like an out-of-place freak, always soaking in the desolate library, reading books.

The pinnacle of magic is also the highest point of knowledge.
Sykes read this sentence in a notebook.
From then on, the four words ‘learning magic’ were written at the top of his wish list.

But it was very regrettable that although every merman was a strong warrior from birth, possessing unparalleled combat talent, and the lighter the color of their fishtail, the higher their combat talent, it seemed that as a price, the Creator had resolutely erased the possibility of mermen learning magic—the bodies of mermen could never accommodate magical elements, and they could never perceive the existence of magic.

‘Why can’t I learn magic?’

To find the answer, he decided to leave his clan and travel far, seeking the truth as a wandering scholar.

Sykes spent three hundred years wandering the seabed, then found ways to disguise himself as a human and spent a full two hundred years on the continent.

Until the news of the entire merman clan’s disappearance reached his ears.

He set off overnight from the southern end of the world to the northern end, only to find an empty clan territory.
No information, no text, as if their existence had been erased from thin air.
The merman clan, from several thousand lively fish, was reduced to just him, a freak.

From then on, Sykes never left this sea area again, and the legend of the merman clan’s collective disappearance spread to the outside world, also giving this place the name “Sea of Death.”

Click.

The last treasure was pulled open by the merman.
Upon discovering it was a scroll with writing, his originally rough movements suddenly softened, as if he were treating a beautiful lover.
Sykes gently unrolled the scroll, not expecting something to be rolled inside.
That thing rolled onto the ground.

But it didn’t roll on the ground for long.
Before it could join its glittering predecessors, it was gently pressed down and then picked up by two long, slender white fingers.

The thing was about half the size of a palm, its shell a cold silver-white, exuding the unique luster of metal.
A quarter of its metal shell had already shattered, and the tiny fragments were probably long lost in the depths of the ocean, which made Sykes click his tongue in regret.
Because he was sure that this was a strange metal he had never seen before, which made him even more interested in the thing in his hand.

It looked like a broken item, but at least the core was still there.

The core encased in the shell was a scarlet, gem-like object, cut into sixty-four facets.
There seemed to be a flow of light inside the gem, making it look like a living thing.

Sykes inserted his finger through the crack and touched the core gem.

[Beep, querying core permissions…]