After bids of farewell to the killer whale pod, Lansi and Winsor didn't dare delay their journey any further. They locked onto their coordinates and swam steadily in the direction of the Alliance.
In all honesty, spending an entire day swimming flat out through the open ocean was not a particularly pleasant experience.
Lansi trailed closely behind Winsor, pushing through the currents for hours on end. By the time night fell and they sought shelter, he curled tightly against Winsor's side to sleep, feeling entirely drained of strength.
It felt exactly like the aftermath of running a grueling marathon—to the point where he couldn't even feel his own fish tail anymore.
"You get this exhausted after just a short journey? I truly don't know how you managed to swim across the entire ocean all by yourself back then," Winsor murmured. They were currently resting inside a secluded underwater cavern, and he asked the question while gently massaging the small of Lansi's aching waist.
"That was completely different," Lansi huffed.
If it weren't for the lingering, irrational fear that massaging too close to his hips might accidentally trigger his transformation into human legs under the water—causing him to instantly lose his gills and drown—Lansi would have eagerly demanded Winsor rub his entire tail. He looked at Winsor, explaining with absolute seriousness:
"Back then, I was driven by the pursuit of freedom."
"Freedom?" Winsor arched a dark eyebrow, unable to suppress a soft, amused chuckle.
Lansi knew Winsor was deliberately teasing him. Thinking back on his frantic survival flight after escaping the lab, he couldn't help but let out a dramatic sigh. Yes, fine, looking back, calling it a grand quest for "freedom" was a bit of a stretch; at that time, he had simply been running for his life.
Feeling the rhythmic, soothing pressure of Winsor's hands on his lower back, Lansi couldn't resist wrapping his aching white tail loosely around Winsor's dark fluke, asking in a pitiful, pleading tone:
"Do you actually know how to massage a fish tail?"
Winsor went entirely rigid. "...How on earth does one even massage a fish tail?"
A profound, bewildered silence fell over the two mermen at the question.
*Ah, being a merman is truly exhausting.*
Seeing Lansi's thoroughly defeated posture, Winsor offered a quiet word of comfort: "Just push through for two more days. We will arrive at the coast by then."
"If I had known it would be this brutal, it would have been better to let the seagulls hijack us a military plane," Lansi grumbled weakly. "At least a flight would have gotten us there in a day and a half."
Winsor gently stroked Lansi's hair, though he didn't offer a response to the ridiculous mental image of a flock of birds piloting an aircraft.
Lansi pouted in depression for a brief moment before forcing himself to cheer up. He shifted slightly and asked, "The small northern island the young killer whale mentioned earlier... do you have any idea what it actually is?"
In Lansi's eyes, Winsor was essentially a walking encyclopedia of the ocean, possessing absolute knowledge of everything beneath the waves. As for whether he qualified as a "Merman Encyclopedia"...
Well, Lansi had originally trusted Winsor with all his heart and believed every single word he said because he genuinely thought Winsor was an ancient, wise merman. Now that he knew Winsor wasn't a merman at all but a cosmic entity, he still found himself looking to him for answers.
"If my deductions are correct, it used to be an offshore research base constructed by the humans," Winsor replied, his brow furrowing as he recalled the young orca's frantic description of the black water. "However, it should have been completely abandoned long ago."
As for the exact reason behind humanity's retreat from the facility, it aligned perfectly with Lansi's previous theories. Following the collapse of the old world, the sudden, violent emergence of colossal sea monsters meant that humans no longer possessed the naval supremacy to remain on the open sea for extended periods. Consequently, their offshore experimental outposts were systematically deserted.
Yet, hearing the killer whale describe active, corrupting pollution leaking from the northern island strongly implied recent human activity, which naturally sparked intense curiosity in both Winsor and Lansi.
Was this a rogue, secondary experiment authorized by the Alliance high command, or was it being orchestrated entirely behind the scenes under Will's explicit instructions?
"What do you think Will is truly trying to accomplish?" Lansi couldn't help but ask.
Since Will was fundamentally a splintered, emotional incarnation of Winsor himself, Winsor ought to possess an intrinsic understanding of how the creature's mind operated.
"You must understand... he is the condensed backlog of all my repressed negative emotions, forbidden desires, and dark impulses," Winsor explained. Remembering his first true encounter with Will within Lansi's dreamscape, his expression turned deeply complex.
While Will had actively attempted to consume Wen Yu's lingering psyche with pure malice, Winsor had been forced to confront the darkest corners of his own past vessel. In doing so, he had peeked into the core desire driving Will's entire existence—
To love someone is to absolute, permanently possess them.
"He simply wants to violently seize everything he takes a liking to."
Winsor reached up and massaged his temples, feeling a profound headache coming on. He truly hadn't anticipated that his own fractured incarnation would possess such a primitive, childishly simple desire.
After listening to Winsor's clinical explanation, Lansi tilted his head in deep thought. He actually understood the logic perfectly.
Back when he had first woken up in this world, Winsor had immediately dragged him down into the depths of the coral bones to hide him away. That possessive impulse—resembling a child who finds a shiny treasure and immediately seeks a secret spot to conceal it from the rest of the world—was really...
As expected of Winsor.
The singular, terrifying difference between them was that Winsor possessed the ancient wisdom to restrain his darker impulses with logic and reason, whereas Will had absolutely no intention of tempering his desires.
After their casual conversation drifted to an end, Winsor and Lansi ceased talking, settling deep into the curves of the underwater cave to sleep.
However, after keeping his eyes squeezed shut for a long while, Lansi found himself completely unable to drift off. He opened his eyes, staring blankly into the pitch-black shadows of the cavern, and began to mindlessly blow bubbles out of sheer boredom.
One by one, the tiny, translucent spheres floated toward the rocky ceiling before finally bursting with a soft *pop*.
This was the absolute pinnacle of Lansi's current midnight entertainment.
*Being a merman in the middle of the ocean is genuinely, profoundly boring,* Lansi thought to himself, continuing to release another steady stream of bubbles.
"What exactly are you doing?"
Hearing the relentless, rhythmic snapping of popping bubbles right next to his ear, Winsor finally reached his limit. He delivered a playful, disapproving swat to Lansi's waist to signal his dissatisfaction.
Lansi barely registered the light tap on his flank. He simply raised his head, staring listlessly at the jagged roof of the cave, and muttered under his breath, "I want to play video games. I want to eat crispy fried chicken and drink cold beer."
Winsor: "..."
"If we were on land, the humans definitely wouldn't even be asleep yet at this hour," Lansi continued, his voice laced with deep melancholy. "It's honestly so much better being a human. The inventions humanity cooks up ensure that the night never has to be boring."
Winsor wavered slightly upon hearing that declaration.
Because he had spent countless centuries slumbering in absolute isolation at the bottom of the abyss, Winsor originally harbored no profound feelings regarding the rapid evolution of human science and technology. However, after inhabiting Wen Yu's body and experiencing society on land firsthand for several years, even a cosmic entity like Winsor had to concede the point: humanity was a species that excelled phenomenally at the arts of luxury, comfort, and entertainment.
"So... Winsor, please don't let humanity go extinct, okay?" Lansi pleaded, seizing the opportunity the moment he noticed Winsor's stoic expression soften. "If mankind completely vanishes from the earth, this world is going to become unbearably dull."
"...Are you actually interceding on behalf of the human race right now?" Winsor asked, the pieces of the puzzle finally clicking together in his mind. He stared at Lansi in the darkness, a metaphorical black line of exasperation crossing his face.
Looking back, his little fish had been executing this strategy for a long time. From his very first demand for seasoned grilled fish to his current bout of late-night insomnia, Lansi was constantly finding subtle, creative ways to highlight the absolute best aspects of human civilization.
"Correct," Lansi confessed with utter readiness. He rolled over fluidly, looking directly into Winsor's eyes with absolute sincerity. "Winsor, I mean what I said. If the extinction of mankind truly becomes an inevitable reality, I just desperately hope that *you* won't be the hand that executes them."
A heavy, suffocating silence blanketed the cavern for a long time. Finally, Winsor's low, resonant sigh echoed from the darkness:
"Very well. As you wish."
Ultimately, it wasn't an unreasonable request to grant his little fish.
---
After finally getting some rest, the two mermen continued on their journey.
Because of how late he had stayed up the previous night, Lansi had been utterly listless all morning. He trailed faintly behind Winsor, too drained to utter a single word.
This resulted in an incredibly quiet trek—so quiet, in fact, that Winsor found himself stopping every few minutes just to look back and make sure Lansi was still following him.
Without his noisy little fish filling the ocean with chatter, the journey felt entirely bizarre.
"This is unnatural." Winsor thought to himself.
"Cheer up," Winsor said, gently pinching Lansi's cheeks. He applied just a fraction of pressure, trying to jar Lansi back to reality with a tiny spark of discomfort. "We are already approaching the waters near the island. Keep your wits about you so we don't accidentally run into something we shouldn't touch."
"Hmm?" Lansi managed to summon a sliver of energy, blinking awake. "Are we actually going to go up and take a look at that island?"
"We'll see," Winsor gave an ambiguous answer, adding, "For now, let's just inspect the perimeter from beneath the waves."
He raised his head, staring into the gloom ahead as a shadow of concern crossed his features. "The structural layout here has changed drastically compared to my memory... The humans seem to have violently shifted the deep-sea reefs and excavated the seabed sand. The underwater vortexes have multiplied exponentially. Stay alert."
Hearing the warning, Lansi forced himself to snap out of his daze. Pushing close to Winsor's side, he peered into the distance—
There was nothing but a wall of absolute darkness.
Just as Winsor had described, the sudden proliferation of deep-sea vortexes had thrown the undercurrents into complete chaos. The violently churning water made it nearly impossible to discern a true heading. Paralyzed by the lack of visibility, the two mermen were forced to drastically reduce their speed, moving sluggishly just below the surface of the sea. The moment they felt a sudden shift in the pressure of the current, they would immediately veer away to avoid being sucked in.
Lansi glued himself directly behind Winsor, acutely aware of his own severe lack of ocean survival experience. In a treacherous environment like this, the greatest contribution he could make was simply staying out of Winsor's way and not causing a distraction.
Before they had swam much further, both mermen noticed a deeply unsettling detail: this entire sector of the sea was completely devoid of marine life. To make matters worse, a thick, metallic tang of rust began to bleed into the water.
"The environment here has been heavily contaminated," Winsor observed coldly.
Lansi pursed his lips, instinctively shallowing his breathing through his gills.
The further north they swam, the more overpowering the sickening smell of rust became, and the lower the underwater visibility plummeted. Lansi felt the water passing through his respiratory system turn viscous and sticky, making his chest feel uncomfortably tight.
He desperately wanted to leave this wretched place as quickly as possible.
*Thump.*
Suddenly, Lansi felt the trailing edge of his tail collide softly with something hidden in the murk.
He turned his head back in confusion.
Because his brilliant white tail was exceptionally long, the vast, veil-like caudal fins billowed out in massive, flowing sheets through the water, completely obscuring his line of sight at first. He didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Assuming he was simply hallucinating from the exhaustion and pollution, Lansi turned around to keep swimming.
He didn't even get to take a single stroke before a tiny streak of color violently leaped right in front of his face, releasing a furious, bubbles-laced roar:
[Don't humans teach you any manners?! You don't even know how to apologize after slamming into a fish?!]
Lansi blinked, focusing his eyes through the sticky gloom, and discovered a tiny, bright orange-and-white fish hovering aggressively before his nose.
Oh, it's a clownfish.
[I am so sorry,] Lansi apologized subconsciously, his mind registering the sheer absurdity of the situation. Then, a wave of profound surprise washed over him as he asked, [Wait... why on earth are you still out here?]
According to Lansi's knowledge of marine biology, clownfish were strictly tied to their host sea anemones. They rarely strayed more than a few inches away from their stinging tentacles, let alone ventured out into the open ocean entirely alone.
`[Wait... do you know who I am?]` the clownfish asked, hovering in mid-water. `[Oh, by the way, have you happened to run into my friend? Its body is bright blue, its tail fluke is yellow, and it's quite flat.]`
*Oh, wow, this little guy is actually a sea monster variant too!*
In a fraction of a second, the pop-culture gears in Lansi's brain spun into overdrive—
A lone clownfish... a flat, blue body with a yellow tail...
Lansi's eyes gleamed with absolute euphoria. He spun around and shouted toward the dark merman swimming not far away: "Winsor! Winsor, look! I'm literally witnessing the live-action prototype of *Finding Nemo*!"
Winsor: ? ? ? ?
According to the clownfish's own testimony, it was currently suffering from absolute amnesia.
It had no inkling of why it had suddenly materialized in this exact sector of the sea. From the moment it achieved higher consciousness, its fractured memory only retained a vague, lingering instinct that it was supposed to be doing something incredibly important—and that it definitely used to have a close friend.
Lansi's eyes shone with a tearful, profoundly moved light as he listened to the little fish speak. He was nearly brought to tears by the tragic narrative unfolding before him.
`[Are you... okay?]` The clownfish was thoroughly bewildered by Lansi's intense emotional reaction.
`[I once watched a deeply touching, masterpiece of a cartoon back in my world,]` Lansi choked out, sniffing dramatically. Whether his tears were genuinely for the plot of the movie or simply a sudden wave of homesickness for his carefree human childhood, he couldn't stop himself.
`[In that story, a brave clownfish father abandoned the safety of his anemone and crossed an entire perilous ocean just to rescue his lost son. And along the way, he met a fiercely loyal companion named Dory.]`
Lansi fixed the little fish with a dead-serious, completely earnest gaze. `[I bet you left your nest and swam all the way out here to find your missing son. It's the only thing that makes sense!]`
He then took it a step further, inventing a dramatic backstory that hadn't even been in the original Pixar film: `[And you must have lost your memories because the sheer, agonizing grief of losing Dory later on was simply too much for your little heart to bear!]`
Clownfish: [...]
Winsor blankly patted Lansi on the shoulder to silence him, then turned a stoic gaze toward the tiny creature to offer a rational explanation: `[The reason you are experiencing memory loss is most likely due to a sudden biological mutation into a sea monster, which forced your brain tissues to rapidly restructure. Do not listen to a single word of his nonsense.]`
Upon hearing Winsor's clinical clarification, the little clownfish let out a massive sigh of relief, its fins sagging.
`[Thank goodness. I was genuinely terrified for a second there. I absolutely do not want to inherit a bunch of random sons out of nowhere.]`
`[But the fact that you are the sole fish inhabiting these waters is indeed highly abnormal,]` Winsor noted, his analytical gaze sweeping the dark currents.
Clownfish were naturally social creatures that thrived in vibrant coral reefs, typically organizing themselves into structured family units of dozens of individuals living in perfect symbiosis with large sea anemones. Finding a solitary clownfish wandering through a barren, toxic trench was deeply unnatural.
`[Hey, what are your guys' deal anyway?]`
The personality of this mutated clownfish was incredibly bold, bearing absolutely none of the naturally timid, skittish temperament of its mundane species. It was completely brash and careless.
`[How did you two manage to swim into this mess? Are you trying to get out? Can you take me with you?]`
The clownfish spat out a stream of bitter bubbles at Lansi and Winsor, grumbling, `[I've been trapped in this damn maze for ages. No matter which way I swim, I can't find a way out.]`
Hearing this admission, Lansi and Winsor exchanged a sharp, knowing glance. They had finally noticed the anomaly themselves.
Because the murky depths were overcrowded with invisible, violent vortexes and the visual range was practically zero, they had been pushing through the water for a considerable amount of time—yet they were barely any distance away from where they had started. It was as though they had fallen victim to the classic maritime myth of a ghost wall trapping travelers in a endless loop.
`[Oh, right. In this particular grid of the sea, that foul, black water frequently drifts over, and it smells absolutely atrocious,]` the clownfish added, gesturing with its right pectoral fin toward a dense patch of shadows off to their flank.
`[I actually decided to swim straight into the black current a while back to check out where it was coming from. There seems to be a small island sitting right at the source.]`
`[Uh... you are way too brave for your own good,]` Lansi muttered, realizing his baseline perception of clownfish had been fundamentally shattered.
To be precise, this creature's personality was entirely out of character compared to the animated film he cherished. Wasn't the whole point of a clownfish to be completely neurotic, terrified of its own shadow, and prone to diving headfirst into an anemone at the slightest hint of movement?
Why was this specific specimen acting like a seasoned, reckless explorer?
`[What do you know, giant white fish?]` The clownfish shot Lansi a thoroughly contemptuous, judgmental glare. It proudly hoisted its orange head high into the water, declaring with absolute grandiosity:
`[My ultimate dream is to conquer the sea of stars!]`
The two mermen: `[...]`
"Something about this still feels weird." Lansi thought, shifting his tail uncomfortably in the sticky water.
Seeing that his little fish was about to spiral into another bout of anxious overthinking, Winsor smiled softly and offered a practical suggestion:
`[Since the conditions beneath the surface are entirely compromised, and navigating through these treacherous undercurrents is proving to be nearly impossible...]`
`[We should go above the surface?]` Lansi's intuition flared, instantly catching Winsor's drift before the dark merman could even finish his sentence.
`[Travel along the surface of the sea?]` The clownfish floated upside down for a brief second in deep thought before asking, `[Are you two actually capable of leaving the water?]`
`[Of course we can!]` Lansi declared proudly. He leaned forward, attempting to gently pat the little fish on its bright orange head. `[It looks like you're officially our tiny navigator now. Lead the way and take us straight to that island! Let's hit the road, single father!]`
However, the clownfish didn't immediately move. It hung suspended in the murky current, appearing deeply hesitant.
`[Look, there is definitely no 'Dory' residing anywhere within this toxic sector of the reef,]` Lansi added gently, assuming the little creature's hesitation stemmed from a profound worry over leaving its lost companion behind. `[We've been swimming in circles around this entire grid for ages. Aside from your loud mouth, we haven't encountered a single living soul.]`
`[No, no, no, you've completely misread the situation. I'm not agonizing over some hypothetical blue fish,]` the clownfish clarified, its fins twitching with annoyance. It paused to carefully gather its thoughts, then fixed Lansi with an incredibly stern, deadpan expression:
`[Listen to me closely, giant white fish. Even though I am currently suffering from severe, localized amnesia, I can state with absolute, clinical certainty that I am an unmarried bachelor with zero children.]`
Lansi: `[...]`
"Wow" Lansi thought, truly speechless. "What a cool clownfish."