Chapter 46: The Siren’s Curse

Seeing a rare lord about to be put into a pot, Sykes’s pupils practically quaked.
He swiftly called for Ella to issue a new quest to the players.

The 123 team, who had just returned from their exploration, immediately received this notification—

[Congratulations player for discovering an unknown mysterious creature. Please hand it over to the Lord! The Lord will tell you more news.]

“Wait, wait, wait, Yan Er’mao!!” Huahua let out a heart-wrenching scream and pounced forward to snatch the little octopus.

Old Li didn’t say anything but silently stood between Yan Shuangwen and Huahua, resolutely defending the precious quest item.

Yan Shuangwen pinched the bridge of his nose and said with a bit of a headache, “I just wanted to see its reaction…”

“Stop pretending, Yan Er’mao! How many ingredients have you cruelly put into the pot during this time!” Hua Yibing righteously protected the little octopus behind him, as if the person who had been drooling over the imaginary takoyaki just now wasn’t him.

The tender pink and blue-haloed little octopus trembled noticeably, as if it could understand human language.
However, the three members of the team, immersed in their daily bickering/peacemaking atmosphere, did not notice this.

After so long, the 123 team once again stood in the study of the merman tower.
Just like the time when the first kill of the dungeon had unlocked the main storyline, the lord personally received the few of them.

“My dear subjects, you have discovered a very rare creature,” the silver-haired, golden-eyed merman praised them reservedly and took the little pink and blue octopus.
“The exploration of the unknown will always be your most precious quality on the path of magic.”

“Then, Lord, this octopus… no, what exactly is this creature?” Hua Yibing boldly opened his mouth, but secretly regretted it in his heart.
He should have gone to Scott for an appraisal first before saying anything.

Sykes concealed a part of the truth and only told the players, “It’s not actually the kind of ordinary octopus you usually see. To be precise, it’s an intelligent species that has already gained sentience. I see that he seems a little scared right now. You haven’t done anything to him, have you?”

The 123 team, who had almost cooked an intelligent species, guiltily averted their eyes.

“Where did you find him?” Sykes was curious about this.
To be honest, he didn’t have a very deep impression of this octopus, only remembering that the other was a quiet and trouble-free good neighbor.

Quietness was one of the neighborly qualities that Sykes appreciated, so over the years, he had implicitly protected the other’s territory—after all, if not him, someone else would occupy it.
It was better to choose a more trouble-free fellow as a neighbor.

But no matter what, the other was living in a domain outside the Sea of Death.
How could he fall into the hands of the players?

The gazes of the three players exchanged for a moment, and finally, Hua Yibing and Yan Shuangwen took a step back, giving the space to Old Li.

Old Li began hesitantly, “That… Lord, the course of events was like this…”

Sykes hadn’t expected that the instigator of this matter was not the trouble-loving Hua Yibing, nor the overly curious Yan Shuangwen, but Old Li, who had always appeared in front of people with a very honest and reliable image.

Should he say that a player is worthy of being a player?
No matter how honest they looked on the surface, they actually had a terrifying ability to cause trouble.

In Old Li’s recollection, he had originally brought a backpack full of lemon candies and fried fish fillets, wanting to push the limits of the exploration quest.
But not long after passing the shipwreck, he had originally thrown out a piece of Hua Yibing’s special pan-fried meat patty to blow up the stone mountain in front of him.
But suddenly, he saw some dark thing shoot out from it and flash past his eyes.

Old Li’s intuition told him that it was something crucial, so he followed without hesitation.

But he hadn’t expected that the thing seemed to have discovered it was being followed, so its route became stranger and more remote.
But it still couldn’t shake off Old Li—he had gotten a speed-oriented engraving in the collective construction quest.
After embedding it into his body’s meridians, his swimming speed was no longer what it used to be.

Coupled with the strange persistence players had when they smelled a quest, Old Li had also gone all out.
Whether it was drilling through seaweed or squeezing through cave cracks, even if he got himself all disheveled, he still didn’t give up the chase.

The dark thing seemed to have misunderstood Old Li’s purpose.
Like a brave warrior cutting off his own wrist, it spat out something from its mouth with a ‘po’, and then its entire body shrank by a full two circles.
Its speed also increased a lot compared to before, and it disappeared with a ‘swoosh’, leaving only a little bit of black afterimage.

Old Li caught the thing that was spat out.
It was a small, dead, pink and blue octopus, less than a palm’s size.

“Lord, please believe me. It was really already dead when I picked it up,” Old Li said with a solemn oath.
“Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to put it in my backpack and bring it back. The backpack can’t hold living things!”

“That’s indeed the case. when Old Li handed it to me it really didn’t moves, and I put it in a specimen jar, but I found that it would change its position on its own,” Yan Shuangwen chimed in.

“Lord, we didn’t do anything…” as if to increase the credibility of his words.

Old Li: “…”

While he was lamenting when the team’s tacit understanding would ever stand up, his gaze was slightly lowered, not daring to look at the lord’s current expression.
‘This is bad, this is bad. The lord won’t deduct all our favorability, will he?’

Old Li waited for a long time, but didn’t receive a system notification of a deduction of favorability.
Then he heard the merman in front of him laugh and say, “Although your curiosity is a very precious quality, not harming weak and intelligent creatures is a rule that every sea race needs to abide by.”

“To atone for your crime, I will now give you a mission,” Sykes waved his hand, and a new mission popped up in the players’ notification bar.
“This octopus seems to be under some kind of curse and needs some key things to lift its current state.”

[Special Quest · Lift the Curse: The noble Lord needs you to find certain materials to lift the curse of this long-lived species. The speed at which you complete the mission will determine the Lord’s evaluation of you.]

[Quest Reward: Unknown.]

Old Li looked left and right, but couldn’t find a description of the mission materials.
He asked Sykes in confusion, “Lord, what materials do we need to find?”

But Sykes’s answer was very vague.
“Go back to where you found him and search carefully. The answer is there.”

After seeing the three players leave in a daze, Sykes closed the study window and then activated some kind of mechanism.
A stream of light faintly flashed from the deeply hidden formation below the house.

“I think we need to talk,” he turned around and said to the octopus lying flat on the table.

The little pink and blue octopus’s body stiffened.
It flipped itself over on the table in the shape of a round pancake, its few tentacles as stiff as sticks.

“I know you can understand, my… neighbor?” Sykes struggled with the address.
“I’m very sympathetic to the curse you’ve received, but now we need to talk about why you would appear in my territory.”

To be honest, he hadn’t expected this neighbor’s original form to be so small.
Although it was the juvenile form after being cursed, judging from its current pink and tender appearance, it didn’t seem like a very destructive existence when it grew up.

Every lord-level person could not casually invade another’s territory without permission, because this represented a provocation that was meant to start a war.
Unless you wanted to really fight the other party, or coveted the other’s territory, no one would do that.

Even in the past when there were no rules or order, this situation rarely occurred, let alone now—
Ever since someone at the East Capital’s council had proposed a motion to protect long-lived species, the exchanges between long-lived species had become much less frequent, let alone a war that would make all the short-lived species scream.

Given that the other was as much of a homebody as himself, he shouldn’t be the kind of troublemaking character.

The octopus obviously also knew this meaning.
It finally couldn’t escape reality and could only slowly flip itself over from the table, revealing two small, dark eyes.
The little octopus slowly raised the front half of its tentacles—even the tentacles were pink and tender, like the newly sprouted tips of a plant—and then bent them forward forcefully, forming the shape of a question mark.

This was a common apology gesture in the ocean.
One hand represented an apology, two hands represented an apology worthy of tears, and it had so many hands…

Sykes was silent.

“You can’t speak?” he asked.

This time, all of the little octopus’s tentacles were raised, and the entire octopus looked like an unusually colored chrysanthemum from above.

‘Has it degenerated to the point where it hasn’t even evolved to make sounds because of the curse?’

“Can you write?” he looked at the other’s short, fleshy tentacles and finally asked.
If it really couldn’t, then he would temporarily take it under his care.
It wouldn’t be too late to ask after the players had found the things to lift the curse.

Fortunately, the octopus had a new reaction this time.
Its not-so-obvious little head nodded vigorously, indicating that it could try.

Sykes gave him a quill pen, but it was blocked by the other’s tentacles.
Before the question mark could appear in his mind, he saw the little octopus crawl onto the paper in a few moves.
The tip of one of its tentacles had already turned dark, spraying ink onto the paper.

He had almost forgotten the innate talent of the octopus clan.

Sykes looked at the characters the other had drawn on the paper—”Siren, recuperate, plunder, merman, save.”

Perhaps because it was in a juvenile state, its stamina was a bit insufficient.
After just writing these few words, it had already collapsed into a pile of pink and blue soft mud on the edge of the paper.

“It’s indeed the siren’s curse. Those guys are so idle they’re going crazy,” Sykes frowned forcefully.
This was a rare display of disgust from him.

But this was also understandable.
No merman didn’t hate sirens, just as no siren didn’t detest merfolk.
The two races were naturally at odds.
The kind that would fight to the death as soon as they met.
Fortunately, one was in the far south and the other in the far north.
Otherwise, the entire ocean would probably be in turmoil.

“You mean to say, you provoked the sirens and were pranked by them, then while you were recuperating, you were plundered by something, and finally saved by the group of merfolk just now?” The merman quickly composed himself and asked again.

The little octopus nodded hesitantly.
As soon as its eyes met Sykes’s golden pupils, it turned around with a ‘swish’, leaving only its back to him.

But Sykes had no intention of letting him go.
He had felt that something was wrong from the beginning, and now he had finally found the reason—

The merman pinched his neighbor with one hand and brought it to his eyes, so close that the octopus could see how many eyelashes the other had if it opened its eyes.

The little octopus: “!!!”
It couldn’t be bothered with anything else.
Several of its tentacles quickly wrapped around its head, forming a tight ball.

Sykes ignored its actions, only twitching his nose slightly and sniffing the same disgusting smell on it as the residue on Tom’s body from before.

That smell was somewhat familiar, but because it was too faint, it was difficult to distinguish.
But in short, it made the fish’s mood very unpleasant.

“Pfft, pfft, pfft.” After a few sprays,

the little octopus, which still had its head buried in its tentacles, felt itself being sprayed with something that was chilling to the core.