Under normal circumstances, upon acquiring such an alarming specimen, Flandre would have immediately contacted Sister Ch'en to report the severity of the situation and handed the creature over to the LGD for containment.
Today, however, was an exceptional day. With Remilia and the rest of the Gensokyo arrivals newly settled into the villa, Flandre had opted to bring the creature back home first to show everyone.
Meanwhile, back at the residential courtyard, poor Hong Meiling was fast asleep when she suddenly felt a sharp, razor-precise wave of pure killing intent wash over her senses.
She snapped awake in an instant.
Her eyes flew open to find Sakuya Izayoi standing on the garden path nearby, her expression carved from absolute ice. To make matters worse, Flandre and Koishi—who were supposed to be keeping her company—were entirely nowhere to be seen.
In that single heartbeat, Meiling realized with absolute certainty that her life was forfeit.
"Wait, wait! Hear me out—no, let me explain! There's actually a completely reasonable justification for this!" Meiling flailed her arms frantically, trying to wave Sakuya away as the Head Maid glided closer.
"The one who truly needs to hear your life's explanation is Shiki Eiki down in the Yama's court, and my only job right now is to punch your ticket straight to her! Get ready to turn into a human pincushion, you incurable slacker! The World—!"
By the time Flandre and Koishi strolled back up the estate driveway, they were greeted by a rather striking sight near the front entrance: Hong Meiling, completely pale and hollow-eyed, looking as though her immortal soul had already abandoned her mortal vessel.
She was currently bound securely by her hands, feet, and waist, hanging upside down from a sturdy oak branch right above the doorway, pulling off a remarkably convincing impression of a traditional teru teru bozu doll.
Beside her, Komeiji Koishi tilted her head with innocent curiosity. Judging by how stiff and wind-chilled Meiling looked, she had clearly been hanging up there for quite a long time. Since the two little girls had only just returned from the market, there was physically no way they could have run into her before Sakuya strung her up.
Flandre walked directly under the dangling gate guard, reached up to give her swinging boot a poke, and turned back to Koishi with an upbeat grin. "Don't worry, she's still breathing!"
Just as she spoke, the front door swung open, and Sakuya stepped out. The Head Maid offered a crisp, polite bow to her young mistress, though her pale blue eyes blinked in mild surprise when they locked onto the wriggling container in Flandre's grip.
"Welcome home, Second Mistress. My, are we having fresh seafood for dinner?"
"No, no, no! This isn't for the dinner table," Flandre waved her hands defensively, lifting the plastic packaging container so Sakuya could see inside. "I brought it back to show Sister and the others. Look, it's not an ordinary fish—it's a fish with legs!"
"A fish with legs? How delightfully curious," Remilia's clear, refined voice drifted from the entryway. Flandre looked up and saw that the entire Gensokyo contingent had gathered in the foyer.
Fujiwara no Mokou walked over, peering down through the clear plastic mesh with a look of profound disgust. "A fish with legs? Is this some bizarre local specialty of this strange world?"
"It's not a fish, it's a Seaborn," Flandre corrected her promptly. "Besides, ordinary aquatic life is called 'scalebasses' here in Lungmen. If you walk into a market stall and ask for a 'fish', the merchant won't even know what you're talking about."
"Then what's the fundamental difference between this Seaborn thing and a regular fish—or 'scalebass'?" Mokou pressed on, crossing her arms.
The surrounding arrivals leaned in closer to hear the explanation.
"Scalebasses can be cooked and eaten safely, but Seaborn can never, ever be consumed," Flandre stated with absolute seriousness.
"This thing can't be eaten?" Mokou raised an eyebrow, licking her lips. "Is it poisonous like a pufferfish? None of us are afraid of mere poison anyway, and besides, who on earth do you think actual poison could kill among our crowd?"
As everyone knew, in culinary logic, the more venomous or hazardous a river fish was, the more tender, sweet, and delicious its meat tended to be. Its toxins existed merely to deter natural predators. So, upon hearing Flandre's warning, Mokou's adventurous appetite was instantly piqued; she suddenly wanted to see just how exotic an otherworldly delicacy it might be.
"No, it's not standard venom in its flesh—it's something infinitely more terrifying," Flandre shook her head emphatically. "Its blood and cellular tissue contain an anomalous, self-replicating vector that is virtually impossible to deactivate with high temperatures. Furthermore, it possesses terrifyingly aggressive infectious and devouring properties."
Mokou scratched her head, struggling slightly to parse the technical jargon. "Can you speak in plain human language, please?"
"Any living creature that ingests Seaborn flesh undergoes an irreversible genetic breakdown and biological corruption, transforming step-by-step into a new Seaborn until they completely lose their humanity and join the hive mind," Flandre summarized grimly.
"Oh? Is that all? Sounds like a wonderful little organism," Junko remarked smoothly, a chilling, enigmatic smile touching her lips.
The moment she heard Flandre's explanation, Junko's immediate tactical instinct was to procure a massive shipment of these creatures, smuggle them across the dimensional barrier straight onto the Moon, and feed them to every single Lunarian until those arrogant beings all sprouted fish legs.
"It's not as simple as you think, Junko. You know the technological foundation of the Lunarians—they possess hyper-precise biological excision tools capable of purging memetic and cellular contamination of this tier," Hecatia chimed in, walking forward.
She reached out a pale hand, lightly pinched the edge of the Seaborn container, and plucked a tiny, wriggling fragment of flesh from the creature's outer membrane. She held the pulsing piece of meat in her palm for a second, examining its erratic twitching before shaking her head. Knowing Junko's eternal obsession with the Lunar Capital, Hecatia easily read her friend's thoughts and preemptively crushed that line of plotting.
"Furthermore, this level of biological infection can be entirely resisted if the host's personal spiritual energy is formidable enough," Hecatia added casually.
She closed her fist over the flesh fragment. As everyone watched, the tiny lump of Seaborn tissue suddenly seemed to come alive, desperately trying to burrow into the pores of her palm—only to crash against an invisible, impenetrable barrier of divine aura that flattened it instantly.
"Even so, for ordinary mortals across this planet, a thing like this running loose would still be an absolute extinction-level catastrophe, wouldn't it?" Mokou muttered, staring down at the wriggling creature with narrowed eyes while mentally calculating how high she would need to crank her eternal phoenix flames to completely vaporize every last cell of it.
"Precisely," Hecatia nodded in agreement.
Remilia turned her gaze back to her younger sister. "Then why on earth did you bother bringing this dangerous thing back to the villa, Flandre?"
"Because it's fascinating!" Flandre smiled brightly. "Think about it—even though these creatures reportedly swarm across the southern oceans, Lungmen is an inland metropolis located thousands of miles away from any coastline. Under normal ecological laws, a Seaborn should never be able to survive a cross-continent journey and end up sitting in a wet market holding tank."
Flandre's observation made the surrounding group fall into a thoughtful, slightly uneasy silence.
"You're saying these creatures infest the oceans across this entire planet?" Remilia asked, her brow furrowing.
Without a word, Flandre turned on her heel, trotted into the villa's expansive library under everyone's watchful eyes, and returned a moment later carrying a heavy, leather-bound archival ledger.
"This historical chronicle from Great Yan records a catastrophic anomaly that took place roughly sixty years ago," Flandre explained, flipping open to a marked page. "A monstrous, unnatural tsunami slammed into the coastline of a nation called Iberia, swallowing nearly half of the country overnight. After the floodwaters receded, vast swaths of Iberian territory transformed into toxic saline-alkaline wastelands where no green life could ever take root again."
She pointed a small finger at the ink-stained text. "This historical disaster is known among the nations of Terra as The Great Silence. And that unprecedented tsunami was no meteorological accident—it was orchestrated entirely by the Seaborn and their radical cultists, the Church of the Deep."
Flandre handed the ledger over to her older sister.
Remilia accepted the book and scanned the faded text. The historical entry did indeed document the coastal cataclysm, but it was written in dry, bureaucratic prose that lacked the terrifying depth Flandre had just outlined—there was not a single mention of any underlying mastermind or aquatic hive mind.
"This historical record isn't nearly as detailed as what you just described," Remilia noted, looking up from the page. "How do you know all of this background so clearly?"
"Because I've read about it in other reference materials," Flandre replied matter-of-factly.
Standing nearby, Komeiji Satori tilted her head in quiet contemplation. In that exact fraction of a second, her psychic perception had naturally brushed against Flandre's surface thoughts, catching a vivid, compressed cascade of secondary memories regarding The Great Silence—dramatic mental imagery, terrifying auditory records, and dense lines of sociological text confirming that Flandre's historical claims were entirely authentic.
And more than that...
From the mental snapshots Satori had inadvertently previewed, the anatomical structures of those deep-sea horrors were profoundly unsettling. They were true monstrosities of the abyss, mutating and evolving in whatever chaotic, horrific direction suited their survival.