Chapter 448: Human-Faced Fish

If you want something, just kill for it.

No. That’s not right!

Saul shut his eyes, suppressing the sudden surge of murderous desire from within. He casually stowed the goblet into his compression bag and immediately turned to swim upward.

Just as Saul left the narrow underwater cave, the seabed beneath his feet suddenly began to quake violently.

The few remaining fish in the sea abruptly began to swim in a frenzy.

No—“swim” wasn’t even the right word. They were treating the ground as if it were water, launching themselves like arrows from a bow, slamming headfirst into the seafloor!

“Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud!”

In the turbulent ocean, Saul didn’t hear a sound.

But when he saw those fish heads turning into a bloody pulp, his mind filled in the sound of brutal impacts all on its own.

That imagined sound, fused with the pounding of his own heart, made his blood boil.

“Could this be because I took the goblet?”

But now, putting it back wasn’t even an option.

The seaquakes had crushed the already narrow tunnel into a pile of ruins.

Without hesitation, Saul surged upward as fast as he could.

He had barely swum a few meters when columns of gray-white gas suddenly erupted from the water behind him.

These columns slowed down due to underwater resistance, allowing Saul to get a clear look at what they really were.

They were fish—gray-white fish, each with a human face!

Unlike the mermaids of fairy tales, who had human torsos, these creatures had only a human face. The rest of their body was purely fish.

Because the face grew on the head of the fish, it was split down the nose, folding outwards to either side.

Each human eye was positioned on either side of the fish’s head.

More and more gas columns erupted from the seafloor, accompanied by frothing bubbles, turning the water murkier and murkier.

Saul had no choice but to cast Soul Armor to avoid being struck by the gas columns.

On instinct alone, he wanted nothing to do with those human-faced fish.

Even with Soul Armor active, the barrage of gas columns slammed into it, shoving Saul violently toward the surface.

With clouds of bubbles and swirling sediment, he tumbled upward through the water.

In an extremely short span of time, he burst through to the surface.

His insides churned like he was about to vomit blood!

Saul had to cast a basic healing spell just to stabilize himself.

But just as he finally steadied himself at the water’s surface, he looked around, and was horrified to see one grotesque, folded human face after another.

The only silver lining was that none of the faces were paying him any attention.

They stared at the sky, at the sun, at the clouds, the wind, the distant land.

Their expressions were rapturous, intoxicated by it all, as they took deep breaths, mesmerized.

They struggled to raise their upper bodies from the water, as if desperate to break free from the sea’s hold.

But to Saul, this act of enjoying the air—of savoring each breath—was no different from the rhythmic opening and closing of gills.

Their gills were crimson, streaked with threads of blood.

They were still fish—not human.

The remnants of soul-bound obsession clung to their forms. As people, they had feared the ocean, yearned for the air.

Saul had no intention of soaking in seawater alongside these human-faced fish. After healing himself, he immediately cast Flight, soaring into the air.

From high above, the scene below was even more grand, and more grotesque.

It was then that Saul suddenly noticed one of the fish bearing a golden hairclip on its scaly body.

He recognized that hairclip. After a moment of searching his memory, he confirmed it.

“That’s Mido’s hairclip—Sander’s sister.”

At this moment, the distorted girl’s face was also enjoying the air with blood all over her body, but she didn’t know that for her, the air out of the sea water was like the moon in the water, and being obsessed with it would only drown her.

Including Mido, these souls that had perished in the Soul Tide had been suppressed beneath the sea for years. Their souls were no longer intact. Most of their fragments had been steeped in thick, violent evil thoughts, gathering in the confined, narrow depths.

Saul believed that the Soul Tide was born from the eruption of that accumulated evil thoughts.

A yearning for freedom—a hunger for life had driven them to seek the land once more.

But because a portion of the main souls were still trapped at the seafloor, the soul tide that had transformed into the tide would inevitably rise and fall—eventually returning to the deep, back to the sides of these “faces.”

Just like how Morden, back at Hanging Hands Valley, even after becoming a wraith, still wanted to recover the other half of his soul body.

Recalling Sander’s letter—how he had lingered in Blue Water Town—he was probably searching for his sister’s soul body. Saul hesitated for a moment, then flew over and collected the fish with Mido’s face.

He raised his hand to conjure a water sphere and placed the fish with Mido’s face at its center.

The moment it was trapped inside, “Mido” immediately panicked. Like a person about to drown, she began struggling frantically.

Her head slammed repeatedly against the water sphere’s edges, trying to force her way out.

Saul frowned deeply.

“Mido!” he shouted sharply.

And surprisingly, the fish instantly turned around, aiming its sharp face at him.

Its mouth opened and closed, revealing rows of tiny, dense, and razor-sharp teeth.

“You can actually understand your own name?” Saul held the water sphere in one hand and rubbed his chin with the other. “Stay still there. I’ll take you to see your brother Sander.”

Saul was merely trying it out, but unexpectedly, “Mido” really did seem to understand.

She immediately dove into the center of the water sphere, enduring the pain of near suffocation, but no longer tried to surface.

If one ignored the distorted face and the silver fish tail behind it, the look in her eyes actually seemed pure.

Now that she had calmed, Saul turned his gaze back to the other fish beneath him.

In truth, every one of these human-faced fish likely had someone out there who once cared for them.

But regrettably, Saul couldn’t possibly take all of them, nor could he search the world for their living relatives.

The nearby fish turned their heads one after another when they saw Saul take in Mido.

They too seemed to understand Saul’s words. Within their fish eyes, there appeared expressions of comfort and joy.

These fragments of souls, suppressed at the seafloor and attached to fish bodies, carried not a trace of evil.

“Return to the deep,” Saul said gently, his voice echoing in the ears of every fish. “The surface is no longer a place where you can survive.”

Even he could not save so many shattered souls, and the power within these pure souls wasn’t enough to sustain their existence for long. Once the sealing force was undone, they would break apart further and vanish from this world.

But if they returned to the depths, they might be able to linger just a little longer.

However, all the nearby fish shook their heads at Saul in unison—then once again began to struggle at the surface like drowning people.

At that moment, a sudden thunderclap roared through the sky. Huge raindrops started pouring down.

“This rain is wrong!” Saul immediately cast Soul Armor to shield himself and “Mido.”

The very next second, he felt the rain corroding the magic on his armor. Saul had no choice but to continuously pour magic into the spell to maintain it.

At the same time, raindrops hit the sea surface—splashing onto the human-faced fish. Instantly, hissing white steam rose from their bodies.

The human faces and fish flesh were being simultaneously corroded by the rain, exposing wide, gruesome wounds.

And yet, disturbingly, these fish wore expressions of ecstasy and rapture as they were melted away.

The rain came hard and fast, but within a single minute, it stopped.

By then, the entire surface of the sea was covered in pale white bones.

The blood of countless fish had dyed this section of ocean a deep red.

Just then, from the waters surrounding Saul—within dozens of meters—streams of pure white soul fragments suddenly rose and floated toward him. But they were blocked by his Soul Armor.

A thought flashed through Saul’s mind. He canceled the armor.

And the fragments of pure, untainted souls flowed into his body one by one—bringing with them soul power that was pristine, strong, and free from even the slightest impurity.

Power that didn’t require the Dead Wizard’s Diary to purify—he could use it fully, just as it was!

(End of Chapter)

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