"When water becomes sky, remember to breathe."
The tips of Nansong's tentacles curled up the yellowed note, and the handwriting was blurred by the water vapor.
She was just about to laugh at Ma Tuan's childhood middle school syndrome when the entire cellar suddenly shook violently.
"Ma Tuan! Water—"
Before he could finish his words, the pool suddenly flooded back as if it had been lifted up by an invisible giant hand.
The salty and fishy water instantly flooded up to the chest, and the tentacles and hair of Nancai instinctively expanded into umbrella-shaped floats, but the moment they touched the water surface - they snapped back into floating indigo-colored long hair.
She touched her neck in fear, and found that the gill slits had completely disappeared without her knowing.
"Alienation... has been lifted?"
The sound of the glutinous rice balls was broken by the rumbling sound of water.
He took off his mask and threw it into the water, and the human fingers were miraculously losing their webbed membranes.
But this joy was short-lived - the water level was rising at a rate of 20 centimeters per second.
"We're back!"
Nan Song looked at his fingers that had recovered as before with surprise, his slender fingertips drawing tiny bubbles in the water.
She subconsciously touched her neck—the smooth skin no longer had those disturbing gill slits.
Even the fishy smell of water that had always been with them disappeared without a trace, as if the mutations were just an absurd nightmare.
But the joy was short-lived.
The cold cellar water was up to his chin, and in the darkness, twisted shadows were forming at an alarming speed.
Nansong suddenly shuddered - she remembered the little jellyfish named Taohua.
Gurgle——
When the water reached his chin, Nansong saw the dark shadows at the bottom of the pool spiraling upwards in a way that defied fluid mechanics.
They were no longer vague humanoid shapes, but rather some kind of dark fibers weaving themselves, like living silk woven on an invisible loom.
"tour!"
Ma Tuan grabbed her wrist and rushed towards the stairs.
The human's legs moved flexibly in the water, and the dark shadow behind him had gathered into a three-meter-wide spindle-shaped dark ball.
The water suddenly became as thick as glue, and every stroke felt like tearing a spider web.
But at the last second before it passed over his head, Nansong saw spots of light reflected from the water surface wandering on the ceiling - the water really turned into the sky.
Those light spots formed strange constellation patterns, which were the three-dimensional projections of the symbols on the wall.
This is weird.
She hadn't thought about the pink jellyfish in the glass bottle for many years, and the fragments of her memory about it were vague.
But now, the image of that jellyfish keeps popping up in my mind at inopportune times: the translucent cap, the slender tentacles, and the way it slowly dissolved in the water on the day it disappeared...
"Nan Song! What are you daydreaming about?"
Ma Tuan's shout brought her back to reality.
The water level was already above her head, and she had to look up and take a deep breath before the last bit of air was swallowed up.
Gurgle——
The underwater world is eerily quiet.
Those black shadows have completely condensed into some kind of huge monster. The outline of a sea otter can be vaguely seen, but it also has the strange characteristics unique to deep-sea creatures.
Its eyes—if those two glowing, milky-white masses could be called eyes—were staring straight at them.
Nan Song paddled desperately and suddenly realized a more terrifying fact: although their mutant characteristics disappeared, their bodies seemed to still remember how to breathe in water.
"When the water turns to the sky, remember to breathe..."
The words on the note echoed in her mind. Now she finally understood - the reflection of the ceiling on the water was what was called "water turning into sky."
Nansong's lungs were burning.
But soon her lungs stopped burning, and instead she felt strangely comfortable as if they were filled with cool sea water.
They are now breathing in this upside-down world in a way that is not human.
The image of the moon jellyfish resurfaced before her eyes. Nansong vaguely remembered a strange dream she had the morning the jellyfish left: she dreamed she was sinking underwater, but saw sunlight shimmering like stars above the surface...
"Hmm!"
Ma Tuan's muffled groan interrupted her recollection. A pitch-like tentacle wrapped around his ankle, and strange white smoke emerged from the place where the skin touched.
Nansong swam towards him with all his might, but saw more tentacles surrounding him from all directions.
"Hmm!"
Ma Tuan suddenly struggled violently.
Three pitch-black tentacles wrapped around his ankles, emitting corrosive white smoke where the skin touched.
Nansong turned back to pull him, but found that the temperature of the tentacles was a mixture of ice and fire - the outer layer was as hot as a deep-sea hot spring, but the inside was as cold as absolute zero.
Two eyeballs with a diameter of half a meter began to emerge in the core area of the black shadow.
The irises were a sickly milky white, but the pupils stood up like a feline.
When the eyeballs moved, the salinity of the entire water body suddenly increased sharply, and Nancai's tear glands felt stinging as if lemon juice was poured into them.
Snap!
Ma Tuan broke the wooden bars of the stairs and stabbed the tentacles.
What spurted out of the fracture was not blood, but a silver-blue mist composed of countless microscopic jellyfish.
The injured shadow let out an infrasonic scream, shaking the coral walls of the entire cellar.
"It's afraid of physical attacks!"
Nansong suddenly found the water breathable. Every time he swallowed, his throat felt tingling as the anemone's hairs caressed it.
Those spots of light on the ceiling were searing an image onto her retinas: a giant sea otter with nebulae for its paw pads.
The black shadow finally completed its final shape - the twelve tentacles degenerated into webbed forelimbs, and the streamlined body was covered with a blue-black tissue between scales and hair.
This chapter is not over yet, please click on the next page to continue reading!
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
