Creak.
Halfway through closing the lid, White Eel's right hand suddenly froze.
An itchy prickle welled up from deep within his wrist bone.
Lowering his eyes, he saw a slender, raised ridge bulging beneath his scales, slowly swimming up from his right wrist toward his forearm.
"【Blood Swim】..."
White Eel grabbed his right wrist in a firm grip.
"That fish-bone needle back then was just a decoy?"
Seventeen could no longer make a sound.
But White Eel had guessed right.
When spouting that mist of blood, Seventeen had already activated 【Blood Swim】, morphing the bit of tongue he bit off into a slender thorn of flesh and blood, hidden right behind the fish-bone needle to shoot out together.
White Eel had slashed and broken the fish-bone needle, but the tiny flesh thorn grazed past the blade's edge, drilling straight into the gaps between the scales on his right wrist.
Once inside the blood, it would automatically travel deep along the blood vessels, entwining itself around nerves and plunging into internal organs.
White Eel stared at the moving ridge beneath his wrist, suddenly letting out a cold sneer.
"So what if it entered my body?"
"I'll just roast it done."
Fish technique—【Broiled Eel Roast】.
Fine, dense white scales flared open all the way from the back of his hand, and the skin and flesh beneath quickly burned red.
Forced down below the crook of his elbow by the intense heat, the fish thorn thrashed constantly beneath his flesh, yet could no longer penetrate even half an inch further.
White Eel pushed the temperature even higher.
The thrashing under his skin grew weaker and weaker.
Just as the raised ridge was about to curl up and die completely...
Thump!
A dull, heavy impact suddenly slammed from beneath the torture platform.
The entire torture cabin lurched violently to one side.
Torture implements and iron chains swung wildly against the cabin bulkheads, while the medicine case slid across the deck, crashing straight into a corner.
Boom.
A second deafening roar.
The bottom of the cabin buckled violently upward.
Several rivets popped off; one grazed the side of White Eel's face and embedded itself straight into the ceiling.
Boom.
A third explosion.
The bottom deck tore wide open, icy seawater pouring in with a roar through the gap, the water level rising to arm's depth in an instant.
The scales on White Eel's right arm that had just glowed red-hot suddenly dimmed, and massive plumes of white steam billowed out from between the scales.
"Deep-layer cold current..."
Before his words could fade, the seawater surging into the cabin suddenly froze, then violently reversed course.
"A whirlpool tide?"
"Impossible."
"According to the tide charts, this sea area shouldn't have one for the next ten years..."
Screeching metal contortions swallowed the rest of his sentence.
Beneath the torture platform, two deep-sea currents running in opposite directions slammed into and locked against each other.
This torture platform anchored in the open sea could withstand ordinary wind and waves, but it could never hold against a tidal catastrophe like this.
Crack.
The tear in the cabin bottom ripped open even further.
The medicine case had already slid to the edge; another half foot forward and it would tumble out through the bottom along with Seventeen inside.
White Eel's face paled instantly.
Three years of torture-steeping had gone into raising such a Body-Abandoning Salamander head.
This was the humanoid elixir meant for Young Master Yan's fish-transformation, as well as an absolute order handed down to him by the Tide Court; if the medicine were destroyed in his hands, chopping off his own head wouldn't be enough to pay for it.
Clenching his teeth, he kicked off against the cabin wall and lunged straight toward the rushing seawater.
Hooking his left fingers over the rim of the case and stabbing his right wrist's bone fin into the deck, he finally stopped the medicine case right at the edge of the tear.
Yet no sooner had the medicine case come to a halt than the tide suddenly reversed direction.
White Eel's bone fin remained pinned to the deck, but his body was whipped backward by the powerful cold current.
Snap!
The force of the water snapped his elbow in two.
The flesh thorn that had been trapped below his elbow lost all obstruction in that instant, crossing the fractured joint.
The slender raised ridge shot forward along his upper arm.
Heading straight for the hollow of his shoulder.
"Dammit!"
Enduring the agonizing pain, White Eel activated 【Broiled Eel Roast】 once more.
The scales on his severed arm had barely begun to glow red when an even colder current crashed in through the tear, dousing the heat he had just gathered on the spot.
The flesh thorn suddenly surged forward, plunging into his shoulder hollow, then burrowing out of the blood vessel to strike directly at his chest and abdomen.
"Aaargh—!"
White Eel's arm lost all power, and the medicine case slid free, slamming hard against a warped, broken deck plank.
Bang!
The unlatched lid burst open at the impact.
Ice-salt scattered everywhere, and Seventeen's head tumbled out of the case.
As the world spun wildly around him, the last thing Seventeen saw was White Eel's collapsing figure.
The instructor who had always stood beside the torture chair, listening to the screams of others with cold indifference, had finally fallen to his knees in the bloody water, howling like a beast in bone-deep agony.
In the next instant, a turbulent current swept up Seventeen's head, dragging it down into the deep sea.
...
The seawater was freezing.
Yet Seventeen could no longer feel much cold.
Blood was still seeping from the wound at the back of his skull.
That was where the only thing a Body-Abandoning Salamander could never abandon was hidden—the fish aperture.
Now, the fish aperture was shattered.
The force sustaining the head's life was dissipating rapidly as well.
Seventeen could clearly feel the vitality bestowed upon this head by the Body-Abandoning Salamander fading away bit by bit.
His flesh and blood fell silent.
His senses grew weaker and weaker.
He was turning back into an ordinary person.
An ordinary person with only a head left could not live long, of course.
White Eel hadn't lied to him.
This time, he truly was going to die.
"Stop..."
"Please, stop..."
"Just kill me!"
"You monster!"
Voice after voice resurfaced from the darkness.
They were all people he had left behind in the torture cabin over the years.
For three years, those voices had never truly left him.
Over the years, he had inflicted fear and pain upon so many people. Meeting such an end now was perhaps no more than he deserved.
If those people were still waiting for him beneath the sea, then he would go join them.
The whirlpool dragged his head, tumbling and sinking continuously.
Darkness deepened around him.
Yet those agonizing screams gradually receded into the distance.
Like a flock of souls sinking into the deep sea, they finally ceased their chase.
Just as the final sob was about to vanish completely, two faces that had been blurred for many years slowly grew clear from within the darkness.
Back then, the float-commune had not yet burned.
His father stood by the edge of the boat, clutching a fresh catch hauled from the sea, smiling at him.
His mother poked her head out from the cabin door, calling into the distance.
"An Youyu!"
"Stop playing in the water, come back for dinner!"
A faint smile slowly curved Seventeen's lips.
He had finally remembered it.
That name erased so many years ago.
...
Rate on N.U.
