Chapter 629: Shipwrecked Sailors and a Song

Rod hadn't paid much attention at first, but now he took a closer look.

To his shock, he saw the crew and sailors wrapping their heads and palms in clothing, waving and calling out to them.

But even so, Rod could still see, past the shadow of the wrapped clothing, their slack, translucent skin oozing thick mucus.

Star Spirits?

No — Star Spirits had translucent, pale-blue flesh, and their internal skeletons were fully intact.

What Rod saw instead was some sort of constantly writhing, fibrous substance that had replaced their bones.

"What the hell?"

The group halted midair, surveying the crew on the deck of the distressed vessel.

After a moment's observation, they realized only three crew members remained. This was a merchant ship with a fairly deep draft, and there were no obvious traces of magical propulsion.

Three people could not possibly sail this ship.

"Help! My lord! Please, please save us!"

A man with his head wrapped in a red garment shouted. The clothes on his body were loose and ill-fitting.

And the other two were the same.

But they only kept waving, never speaking.

The whole situation was far too bizarre.

The sea elf Laura pointed her recording crystal at Rod: "Faced with this eerie shipwreck, what will Mr. Rod do? Will he coldly throw stones at those already down, or investigate cautiously?"

"What do you mean, throw stones at those already down?"

Rod had gotten fairly familiar with this one by now — she didn't stand on ceremony, and naturally Rod didn't either.

He flicked her on the forehead, hard enough to make her yelp and whine.

Then he looked back at the crew on the ship.

"What happened?"

"My lord, two weeks ago we were hit by a sudden gale. We couldn't reef the sails in time, and our mast snapped clean off and fell into the sea."

"Only the three of you?"

"A disease broke out on board. Everyone else has already died, and we've been infected too — turned into something hideous. We wore the head wraps because we were afraid of frightening your lordships."

"Take them off."

The three surviving crew members exchanged glances, hesitated for a moment, then nodded.

Slowly, they removed the wrapped clothing.

—Three translucent, gelatinous heads were exposed to the sunlight.

Their faces had clearly lost the pulling force of muscle, unnaturally stretched long, drooping down to the collarbone.

Their bones had become black, writhing fibrous matter, and the movement was especially pronounced where their brains were — the black fibers pulsed against the skull, sprouting dozens of "little horns."

The most extreme part was their mouths — split lengthwise all the way to the roots of their ears, revealing three rows of spirally arranged fangs.

The man who had been speaking showed less change than the others.

Perhaps that was also why he could still talk.

"What is this!"

The sea elf Laura gasped in a low voice.

The dogfolk Sharon frowned tightly, and as one versed in biological magic, she immediately made a basic assessment:

"A kind of genetic bloodline contamination. They can no longer be called human."

Dimia couldn't bear it: "Can they still be saved?"

"This kind of bloodline contamination doesn't mean a normal person will simply devolve or evolve into some new creature — it's a continuous collapse of the original biological structure and bloodline factors. To save them—"

Sharon shook her head, "—would be about as hard as molding a new human from scratch. No, even harder."

And from what they were saying—

This bloodline-contamination disease seemed to be contagious as well.

Although by the usual logic of magic that shouldn't be possible, the appearance of the Divine Ascension and the Magic Web canopy meant anything was possible now.

Sharon narrowed her eyes slightly, glancing at Rod and that sea elf called Laura.

She had already decided she wouldn't let these people come ashore.

Quarantine them, study them a bit, then decide.

"No!"

The surviving crew member who could speak let out a sharp, anguished cry.

A great deal of mucus seeped from his body, smearing the deck into a mess as he stamped about.

"The great mage's magic is so powerful — there must be a way to save us! I can't die, my child was just born!"

The other two were equally despondent, sitting wearily on the ground, at a loss.

After drifting for two weeks, they had thought they'd found rescuers, only for the other side to immediately pronounce an untreatable death sentence.

The group fell somewhat silent.

It was Rod who spoke again: "This bloodline contamination — how did you contract the disease?"

"We don't know, we don't know… It just suddenly appeared on one of the sailor's bodies, then one by one they all turned into that ghostly look and melted into blobs of jelly. By the time we realized it was contagious, it was already too late… We don't even know how it spreads…"

The man slumped against the deck, his stretched face revealing no readable expression.

The man's emotions were on the verge of collapse.

Rod also realized that saying anything too negative in front of the victims wasn't quite appropriate.

He ruefully pinched the bridge of his nose — after all, he had rather little rescue experience.

He thought for a moment.

He instantly cast a spell from his magic web spell slots called 【Dassun's Cool Breeze】.

It was a low-level spell that could help a person stay awake.

And he offered a few words of encouragement.

He also drew on the power of 【True Deception】 from the Bewitchment domain.

The sea elf Lora's recording stone was running swiftly; she watched Rod soothing the survivor, her eyes lighting up slightly as she spoke quite a few positive words.

The man soon gathered his strength, and after a brief moment of recollection, opened his mouth to say:

"I remember now. This illness didn't come without warning. The day before the first person fell ill, we ran into a strange siren demon."

"Strange?"

"She was huge."

"Although I've never seen one, I know that much."

Rod nodded.

Siren sea-demons had the upper body of a woman and the lower body of a fish, roughly equivalent to mermaids.

But they ate human flesh; their voluptuous female bodies and enchanting singing voices were nothing but luring traps.

Tally couldn't help pinching his sleeve, her cheeks slightly flushed: "He's not talking about that part."

"Oh."

The man nodded, a look of terror on his face: "We'd run into sirens before — they were about the same size as humans, but this one was different. It was the brother handling the rigging on the mast who spotted her. He said he saw a black shadow in the sea bigger than the ship."

Rod glanced at the merchant vessel — not small, roughly forty or fifty meters long.

He recalled that the largest blue whale he'd ever seen on Earth in his previous life was only a little over thirty meters, wasn't it?

But this was a world of spirituality, so it was hard to say.

"At first we thought it was a whale too, but later we noticed it seemed to retain some human features. At the head, a faintly discernible female face would occasionally surface."

He seemed to recall that face, and his expression turned pained.

His right eye, which had gone transparent, burst with a squelch, spraying out slime — and he himself was completely unaware.

"And then?"

The sea elf Lora felt her stomach spasm a little, but she still held back her nausea and asked.

"Then… then she started singing, just like an ordinary siren. But we always kept earplugs in our pockets — just block your ears and there's no problem. Yes, logically speaking, blocking your ears should be no problem!

But! But! The song came from beneath the water! It made our whole ship tremble! We all heard it, ahhhh!!!"

The man clutched his head in a frenzy, tearing off a large patch of skin from his transparent, gelatinous flesh.

And beneath the skin was a writhing mass of 'fuzz,' wriggling densely like worms.

A siren's song had a hypnotic effect that could make a person throw themselves into the sea.

But they hadn't.

Was the hypnotic power gone?

Rod felt a chill in his heart watching this, and was about to soothe the man's emotions again.

Then he saw the man suddenly freeze, twisting his head to look at the distant sea: "Right… right, that's the song."

Rod's brow furrowed.

He followed his gaze.

His eyesight was extremely sharp, and in an instant he locked onto the 'ripples' far across the water.

— A large patch of water droplets leaping from high-frequency vibrations.

(End of this chapter)