Sperm Whale: [@Jellyfish, @Jellyfish, you are going to be the death of me! Ah ah ah!]
Sperm Whale: [@Jellyfish, how could you just leave me and run away?]
Sperm Whale: [@Jellyfish, fine, I admit it! The Little Cutie you mentioned is a good fish. He didn't eat me.]
The gentle voice of the Humpback Whale soon echoed in the group:
[Sperm Whale, I know you are very excited, but it is best not to spam the screen.]
Sperm Whale: [@Jellyfish, I don't care! I just want the jellyfish to come out. Let's die! Everyone die together!]
Quirrell: [Hahahahaha! The jellyfish is currently in the Bermuda Triangle. Go get him! @Jellyfish]
Hermit Crab: [Hahahaha.]
---
The chat group was filled with the dramatic screams of the sperm whale. Lansi leaned forward, laughing out loud as he watched the messages scroll by.
He and Winsor were still floating right next to the sperm whale. After reading the hints and reactions from the other sea monsters in the chat, this naive whale finally realized Winsor's true identity as the powerful ancestor.
Consequently, compared to its excitement at meeting Lansi in the beginning, the sperm whale was now filled with anger and a deep sense of betrayal. That big fool of a jellyfish had completely misled it!
Now that it knew who Winsor really was, the sperm whale actually hated having such a massive body. If it were just a tiny fish, it could easily turn around and dart away the moment it felt embarrassed. The ocean was so vast; how could anyone ever find a fish the size of a hand? But with a body as huge as it had now, escaping unnoticed was completely impossible.
Fortunately, Winsor didn't say anything or show any anger.
Seeing how terrified and wronged the sperm whale felt, Lansi patted the giant creature on its head to comfort it, signaling that they would not blame it for the misunderstanding.
"Well, how about you give us a ride to Sunset Bay?" Lansi suggested, offering a way for the whale to make it up to them.
The sperm whale was good-natured at heart. Hearing that it could make amends through actions, it became very happy. It opened its massive mouth, inviting Lansi and Winsor to step inside so it could carry them safely to Sunset Bay.
Winsor stared into the dark, black hole of the sperm whale's mouth and said flatly, "I am not going in there."
Lansi, however, had no psychological obstacles at all. He cheerfully swam right into the whale's mouth to look around.
The inside of a sperm whale was not completely toothless like a humpback whale; it had teeth along its lower jaw, which looked a bit intimidating. But since it only had teeth on the bottom, they didn't feel too dangerous. After touching one of the blunt shapes, Lansi called out to Winsor:
"Don't worry! These whales can control themselves perfectly so they won't swallow us by accident. I have experience with this."
If humpback whales could do it, why not sperm whales? Besides, sperm whales didn't have sharp upper and lower teeth like killer whales. Lansi truly believed that if they rejected the whale's offer again, the poor creature might actually cry. It was better to just accept the gesture and be good friends.
Winsor sharply picked up on a specific detail. "This is not the first time you have done this?"
Lansi: ...
Why did Winsor always manage to focus on the weirdest details?
Fearing that Lansi might actually get swallowed if left alone, Winsor had no choice but to swim into the sperm whale's mouth as well. Once the giant whale gently closed its jaws to shelter the two mermen, it turned and began swimming toward Sunset Bay.
Lansi was incredibly carefree. Swimming all this way had exhausted him, so after playing around in the chat group for a little while longer, he logged off and fell fast asleep inside the whale's mouth.
Winsor held Lansi close, closing his eyes to rest while keeping his senses focused on the sperm whale's movements outside.
Winsor: [You are swimming crookedly. Turn toward the west.]
The sperm whale outside was completely confused.
Sperm Whale: [What? What? Where is the west?]
Winsor's mouth twitched.
Winsor: [To your right side.]
Sperm Whale: [My right side?]
Following Winsor's guidance, the sperm whale moved its two pectoral fins, asking curiously:
Sperm Whale: [Which one is my right side?]
Winsor: [The side you normally use to eat...]
Before he could even finish the sentence, Winsor froze. He had completely forgotten that the creature outside was a sperm whale, not a human!
The sperm whale didn't notice his hesitation and replied innocently:
Sperm Whale: [But... I think my two pectoral fins look exactly the same.]
Winsor: [...]
Well, Winsor could now be absolutely certain of one thing: the fact that this sperm whale got lost in the past had absolutely nothing to do with his altered ocean currents.
The whale got lost purely because it was a total directional idiot.
I thought it would save a little time to ride a sperm whale, but I didn't expect it to take even more time. It was already the next day when Lansi and Winsor actually arrived at Sunset Bay.
"Teacher!!!"
Quirrell saw Lansi and Winsor coming from a distance. It happily twisted its eighteen tentacles and floated toward them.
In Lansi's eyes, the current Quirrell had forgotten to make its body smaller. The way it twisted its tentacles in the ocean with its huge body was very scary. It looked like a creature from a nightmare. It reminded Lansi of when he first came to Sunset Bay and was almost skewered directly by Quirrell with an iron rod. He suddenly yelled:
"Don't come near me!!!!"
Lansi also subconsciously yelled at Quirrell with sound waves, immediately blasting Quirrell back.
'Woo woo woo?'
Quirrell was so dizzy from the sound waves that it finally realized it was too big right now. It quickly reduced its body to a small size before drifting back to Lansi's side and asking flatly:
"Teacher, your problem has been resolved?"
Seeing Quirrell become so small and harmless, Lansi felt his fear disappear. He nodded, relaxed, and then said to Quirrell:
"Solved."
Lansi motioned to Winsor next to him to open the bag he had brought. Then, he took out a well-sealed music player from it and handed it to Quirrell, saying:
"Here, this is a gift I brought you."
Quirrell froze for a moment. It carefully stretched out its tentacles, took the palm-sized music player, and asked:
"What is this?"
Lansi smiled, turned on the player, and clicked on a recorded song.
"This is a music player with recordings of your favorite heavy metal rock music. I thought you would like this, so I got one for you."
This was originally what he had asked from Old Tang. Old Tang happened to be a big fan of heavy metal music, so after listening to Lansi's request, he directly gave Lansi a music player packed with songs. Of course, it was completely waterproofed.
A vague sound of music echoed in the sea, but this sound was very clear to the sea monsters.
Quirrell held the little music player with its eighteen tentacles. After listening to it for a while, it suddenly cried out:
"Woo, I really like this thing, and I really like the teacher!"
Lansi touched Quirrell's head and said:
"There are a lot of songs in it, so you can listen slowly. If the battery runs out, let the hermit crab accompany you to the surface, and you can charge this thing using the sun."
"It is good!" Quirrell was immediately full of energy. "In order to charge this little thing, going to the surface is nothing!"
It was determined. Wasn't it just about overcoming its fear of the surface? Compared to music, everything else could be put aside, including its own fears.
Seeing that Quirrell liked the gift so much, Lansi was satisfied. Now that he had given Quirrell the present, Lansi was going to go back to their original den with Winsor to sleep for a while. He bypassed Quirrell and swam toward their old place, asking casually:
"By the way, since you are the only one here, where is the hermit crab?"
For a long time, the hermit crab and Quirrell were almost inseparable. Now that he had not seen the hermit crab, Lansi felt very strange.
"It, it has something to do!" Quirrell hurriedly swam in front of Lansi, blocking his path, and hesitated. "It went to see its relatives."
Lansi paused for a while and looked closely at Quirrell. "Oh."
Quirrell still stood right in front of Lansi under his gaze, with no intention of leaving at all. Lansi waited for a moment, but when he didn't see Quirrell moving, he asked curiously:
"What are you doing blocking me?"
"I, I don't have it!" Quirrell began to change colors, turning red, yellow, and green, lighting up the sea water like a colorful display.
Lansi crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes. It looked like something was definitely going on.
Boom—
Suddenly, a loud noise came from the shipwreck area. The sound was massive, and a shockwave rolled through the sea, causing the tail fins of Lansi and Winsor to shake back and forth. Moreover, this kind of powerful, rhythmic sound was definitely not the kind of noise Quirrell made when knocking around with an iron rod.
Lansi and Winsor turned to look at Quirrell at the same time.
Quirrell's eighteen tentacles almost twisted themselves into a knot, but it was still struggling to make an excuse:
"It's nothing, it's just... Oh, yes, the hermit crab is also practicing drumming."
"Its technique is better than yours." Lansi pointed out mercilessly.
Quirrell: ...
While the two mermen and Quirrell were confronting each other, a series of strong dong dong dong sounds echoed out, shaking the area as if a small earthquake was happening. The sunken ships nearby were shaken by the powerful aftermath. As long as you had a brain, you would know that something was wrong.
"Hey, go to the player and listen to the music by yourself."
Seeing that Quirrell was still preparing to stop him, Lansi sighed, touched Quirrell's head, and gently moved it out of the way. At the same time, he gestured to Winsor with his eyes, asking Winsor to bypass Quirrell so they could go see what was happening.
Winsor nodded, and he cleverly avoided Quirrell's sight and swam over slowly.
Quirrell didn't know that Lansi had deliberately taken it away. When it was led away by Lansi, it was still thinking about an excuse:
"Um, maybe it was a real earthquake?"
Lansi felt that Quirrell was concealing something more and more. He smiled and led Quirrell into a small cabin, and then locked Quirrell inside with lightning speed.
Quirrell: ???
Then, taking advantage of the time when Quirrell was still bewildered, Lansi hurriedly caught up with Winsor and followed him, wanting to see what had happened.
According to the direction of the sound, Lansi and Winsor distinguished their positions by listening carefully, tracking the noise accurately. As a result, Lansi and Winsor were surprised and then left completely speechless by what they found.
They were surprised because they found the source of the sound. The source was the place where they had lived before. More accurately, it was the shipwreck that was specially guarded by Quirrell. They were left speechless because they saw a hermit crab and a colorful shrimp here.
A crab and a shrimp, the two of them were making brutal and inhuman transformations on the sunken ship, hammering back and forth, not knowing what they were doing. The hermit crab was still pointing around, barking orders.
"A peacock mantis shrimp?"
Winsor recognized the shrimp's species at a glance, and he raised his eyebrows.
The appearance of the peacock mantis shrimp was very bright and beautiful, mainly composed of red, blue, green, and other vibrant colors. It had great ejection power because of the club-like dactyl clubs on its chest. It could instantly swing its front claws to smash its prey, like a mantis hunting, which was how it got its name.
Because of its biological structure, the two front claws of the mantis shrimp not only carried a strong hitting force, but the sheer speed of the strike also generated cavitation bubbles, striking the target a second time with a shockwave. In short, a single hammer blow from a mantis shrimp could smash a target to pieces. What was more, this was now a mutated mantis shrimp, roughly the size of the hermit crab itself.
Evidently, there were already deeply pitted holes all over the wall of the ship right in front of the mantis shrimp.
Lansi and Winsor didn't know why there was a mantis shrimp suddenly here, so they hid on the spot, wanting to see how the situation would develop.
After a short while, the hermit crab suddenly raised its voice and began to curse:
"You have no brains! Damn it, if you weren't a fellow sea monster, I would have beaten you with a hammer already."
The mantis shrimp shrank back slightly, and then said stiffly:
"Am I not pounding exactly where you asked?"
"Beat your grandma's leg!" the hermit crab pointed at the pits all over the boat and roared. "I told you to hammer "through" this wall, but your damn hammer has achieved absolutely nothing!"
"Fuck, how can you call me brainless?" The mantis shrimp seemed to finally process the insult. It grew angry as well, turning its body as its two front claws began to twitch eagerly. "I have never eaten such a big crab before."
The hermit crab sneered, posing defensively against the mantis shrimp. "I will have to see if my shell is harder, or if you are harder with your two hammers."
"Why are they fighting?"
Lansi immediately grew anxious when he saw this scene. He quickly swam out of his hiding place, moving to the side of the two sea monsters to stop them.
"Don't fight."
Winsor, seeing that Lansi had already exposed himself, had no choice but to swim out slowly behind him.
In fact, if a fight really started, it would be difficult for the hermit crab to win against the terrifying power of a mantis shrimp. Winsor wasn't particularly interested in who would eat whom, since that was just a natural part of the food chain. But he thought about it and felt that Lansi was right to stop them, because he was highly curious about how a hermit crab and a mantis shrimp—two sea monsters that shouldn't even be associating with each other—had suddenly ended up together.
"Old... Teacher? Teacher, why are you back?"
The hermit crab got along very well with Quirrell and had been learning how to play the drums from it, so it had slowly learned that Quirrell called Lansi 'Teacher'.
Seeing Lansi's sudden appearance, the hermit crab's aggressive momentum instantly withered. It looked exactly like a student caught fighting by a teacher. With a guilty conscience, both of its claws dropped heavily onto the seabed. If the evidence weren't so conclusive, with the shattered ship right there and a mantis shrimp standing next to it, the hermit crab would have tried to claim it hadn't done anything at all.
"I'm done with my own affairs," Lansi said, looking back and forth between the hermit crab and the new mantis shrimp, his head full of question marks. "What are you doing?"
The shipwreck behind the three of them was completely riddled with holes from the mantis shrimp's hammering. Looking at the dense cluster of pits, Lansi trembled slightly, even wondering if the mantis shrimp held some personal grudge against the boat.
The hermit crab froze. "It's nothing, it's just... just..."
"It told me to clear out a space here," the mantis shrimp behind Lansi spoke up directly, without any hesitation. "I did it, but it still wants to fight me!"
The hermit crab grew anxious upon hearing this. If Lansi weren't standing right in the middle, it really would have lunged forward to fight. "You are an absolute fool! How many times did I tell you exactly how to do it? And look how you did it! You mess up this badly and you dare to blame me? I give you an inch and you take a mile!"
"Stop it!"
Lansi was at a total loss. "What exactly do you want to do?"
At this moment, Quirrell floated over from a distance. When it saw Lansi and Winsor sandwiched between a shrimp and a crab, it knew the secret was out.
"The hermit crab just wants to make your lives more comfortable," Quirrell explained, deciding not to hide the truth anymore. It floated over slowly and pointed a tentacle at the wrecked ship behind Lansi. "It wants to learn from humans and build you a duplex villa or something. But it doesn't have the crafting skills, so it went to find a mantis shrimp."
Quirrell looked at the ruined ship, making a face as if it looked terrible, and continued: "The hermit crab thinks that you two need to have a boat, but you definitely don't want to be separated. So it wanted the mantis shrimp to clear out the two boats and join them together, so that you both have your own space but can still be together."
Having said this, Quirrell didn't forget to insult the mantis shrimp. "Tsk tsk tsk. I didn't expect the mantis shrimp to be so useless. After all this time, it still misunderstood the instructions."
Lansi and Winsor glanced at each other, not knowing whether to laugh or cry at the hermit crab's logic. For a hermit crab, perhaps having a shell to live in on its back was the most important thing in the world, but humans—and mermen—didn't quite work that way. This current misunderstanding could only be blamed on the different ways of thinking between the two species.
"You don't need to do this, I just want to stay with Winsor," Lansi said, shaking his head. He wanted to laugh, but he was afraid of hurting the feelings of the overbearing, bossy hermit crab. He could only add, "However, thank you for caring about us."
"No! My fish deserves the best!" The hermit crab was a little frustrated at first, but upon hearing Lansi's thanks, it became proud again. It raised its claws, acting very domineering. "Teacher, you don't have to speak up for the mantis shrimp behind you! Let me teach that mantis shrimp a proper lesson, and it will eventually make you a good nest!"
Lansi was choked by its response. "Uh, I'm not speaking up for anyone. What I said is the truth."
'Can't you just leave things alone?' Lansi thought. 'Stop hammering the boat.'
What left them even more speechless was that the mantis shrimp was still fanning the flames right next to them. "Come on! I'm fed up with you too! I cleared out this area perfectly, what else do you have to say?"
The hermit crab sneered, "Bring it on! You loser!"
The mantis shrimp flew into a rage upon hearing that. It immediately moved all its legs and rushed forward.
"Calm down!"
Seeing that the situation was getting out of hand, Lansi and Winsor quickly stepped forward to stop them. One pushed the shrimp's head and pulled its whiskers, while the other held back its tail, preventing the mantis shrimp from charging forward desperately.
The mantis shrimp was blocked by Lansi. Fearing it might accidentally hurt him, it was forced to stop. As soon as it halted, the mantis shrimp's tone became full of sorrow and anger. It pointed a claw at the hermit crab and complained to Lansi:
"It's completely unreasonable!"
Lansi, caught in the middle of the argument, was stunned for a second. He could only laugh and cry. "The hermit crab just wants to make this place more beautiful."
"Then it should have the skills to do it on its own!" the mantis shrimp complained. "Look at its demands... Come on, tell me, what on earth is a 'big and small round hole'? And what is a 'deep and shallow pit'? I punched the holes exactly as it asked, so why did it then tell me to punch a 'colorful hole'? Aren't all holes just black inside?"
Lansi: ...
Winsor: ...
So, in the end, because of unrealistic demands, the contractor was dissatisfied with the client, and finally stood up for itself?
The hermit crab sneered, "This is called my superb aesthetic taste! Is it really too much to ask?"
Quirrell was still right next to it, standing firmly on the hermit crab's side without hesitation. "Yes! Are we wrong?!"
Lansi tried to interject, "That..."
"I quit!" the mantis shrimp roared angrily. It slammed its claw down, smashing a hole directly into the seabed, and then swam away without looking back at the hermit crab.
Lansi and Winsor looked at each other, really not knowing how to judge this absolute farce.
"Hehehehe, running away in a hurry, what a coward," the hermit crab said, watching the back of the retreating mantis shrimp without any intention of chasing it. It hummed proudly. "Now that it's gone, I can just do it myself, right?"
Quirrell followed up very loyalty, like a supportive partner: "I can help you—"
"Stop right there!" Lansi hurriedly swam over to the hermit crab and blocked their path. "Don't touch our den! Also, this entire matter is your fault! Go back and think about what you did!"
Lansi couldn't imagine what would happen if the hermit crab and Quirrell really did something to the home he shared with Winsor. His cozy nest, which had been so hard to find, would probably be completely destroyed under the iron fist of the hermit crab. If that happened, it really wouldn't be worth it.