"Wait, what are you going to do?" Nansong watched Ma Tuan grab the iron ring with his webbed hands, and his scales made a slight "cracking" sound when his muscles were tensed.
"When I was a kid... I never knew there was a cellar here."
Ma Tuan's voice became unusually dry. With a creaking sound, a thick wooden board was lifted up, revealing a dark entrance underneath.
A cold, salty wind immediately rushed out of the cellar, rustling the old posters on the wall.
Nansong's tentacles suddenly all pointed towards the cellar entrance and began to tremble uncontrollably.
"My hair... I can feel something underneath..."
She swallowed,
"Like... lots and lots of water."
The cracks on Ma Tuan's mask appeared deeper in the dim light.
He felt around the wall and found an old kerosene lamp. Amazingly, despite not being used for years, it still had oil in it.
The moment the flame lit up, both of them gasped at the same time - the inside of the kerosene lamp glass cover was covered with tiny teeth marks.
"Do you want to go down?"
Nansong's voice was so soft that it was almost inaudible. Her hair had already started to flutter.
Ma Tuan looked down at his webbed hands, and his nails had grown long and sharp without him noticing.
"I think... we were led here." He paused.
"The Si didn't just throw us back here randomly. This place... has been waiting for us."
The wooden steps of the cellar looked rotten, but they made an unusually solid sound when Ma Tuan stepped on them.
Nan Song followed closely behind, her tentacles constantly capturing strange information in the air - excessive salt content, abnormal air pressure, and some low-frequency vibrations, like whale songs coming from afar.
"I did live here when I was a kid, but it was very lively back then,"
The sound of the glutinous rice balls echoed in the narrow passage.
"Why did you suddenly send us here? I don't know what your purpose is."
As you go deeper, the walls gradually change from brick and stone to a smooth, coral-like material.
Nansong touched them lightly with his tentacles, and immediately retracted them - those "walls" were warm and pulsating regularly.
"Ma Tuan..." Her voice began to tremble, "I don't think this is a cellar..."
Before he finished speaking, the kerosene lamp suddenly illuminated the bottom. The two froze in place, and the scene before them made Nansong's tentacles curl up into a ball.
At the end of the cellar was a large, hemispherical space with a circular pool of water emitting a faint light in the center.
What was even more creepy was that there were more than a dozen sets of children's clothes neatly arranged at the edge of the pool, and on each set of clothes was a broken ceramic mask, exactly the same as the one Ma Tuan wore when they first met.
"This is..."
Ma Tuan's webbed feet walked uncontrollably towards the pool. The edge of the pool was engraved with symbols similar to those on the basement wall, but under the kerosene lamp, those symbols were slowly wriggling and reorganizing.
Nansong suddenly grabbed Matuan's arm and said, "Wait! Look in the pool!"
Beneath the calm water surface, dozens of blurry figures can be vaguely seen swimming slowly.
When the light from the kerosene lamp hit the water, the figures turned towards them at the same time - each "figure" had scales and gill slits similar to those of a glutinous rice ball, and tentacles and hair like those of a southern cabbage.
"Mermaid...Ichthyosaur..." Ma Tuan's voice was very low.
Just then, the closest set of clothes suddenly moved.
Nansong's tentacles keenly detected a half-yellowed piece of paper sticking out of his pocket. Written in childish handwriting, it read: "When water turns to sky, remember to breathe."
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