This Damned Thirst for Survival

“It’s been a long time,” Li Sha whispered, “and not long after Li Sha’s mum fell in the water, dad started getting weird.”

She buried her head and rubbed it against her sleeve, ” Li Sha misses her mum, and she misses her old dad.”

Jiang Luo gave her two pats on the back and wondered, “How did you save me there?”

“I hide there every night,” Li Sha says meekly, “because sometimes I can save people there. They don’t know how to hide, Li Sha knows. Daddy can’t see with his eyes whenever he turns scary, he can only smell Li Sha with his nose and hear Li Sha’s voice, and as long as he doesn’t make a sound and covers the smell, Daddy and the others won’t find us.”

“Have you saved a lot of people before?”

Li Sha’s expression dimmed, and she nodded silently.

Jiang Luo mentally understood the consequences for those people, but he still asked, “What happened to them afterwards?”

A little girl who survived the presence of so many monsters on the ship, who knew how to hide and how to save people. It’s not an easy thing to do, not even for an adult, let alone a child.

Jiang Luo is somewhat suspicious of Li Sha.

“They were all gone,” Li Sha hugged herself tightly, “I told them to get away, but they were found locked up …… Li Sha tried to rescue them, but Li Sha couldn’t get in. ”

” Li Sha is a good boy,” Jiang Luo said softly, “Are there many more monsters like this on board?”

Li Sha said with some fear, “Many, many …… They look normal during the day, but at night they turn into something else and take their normal look off like they’re undressing, and they drool on Li Sha.”

“But they didn’t eat Li Sha and Li Sha didn’t see any other children on the boat …… Every time someone came on board, I got a few adults to tell them about it, but they didn’t believe me.”

Jiang Luo is thoughtful.

When he first landed on the Angonese, Ge Zhu noticed something about the absence of small children in the crowd.

It would make sense if the crew were all blood eels disguised as monsters. This is because blood eel eggs are extremely difficult to live with, but can be raised in the human body, and the successfully raised blood eel females have some wonderful functions, such as rejuvenating and increasing life expectancy.

The crew and the wealthy then agreed to cooperate, with the wealthy bringing civilians on board and the crew using the bodies of the civilians as vessels to sell a portion of the live females to the wealthy, who would then bring a large number of civilians on board the next time they boarded.

Perhaps because the body of a child is not fit to be used as a vessel, or because of the difficulty of reproducing offspring, blood eels do not strike at the young of other races, and Li Sha has survived to this day.

Jiang Luo rubbed Li Sha’s head, “The vast majority of people in the world live foolishly and won’t believe the facts if they aren’t put in front of them.”

Like Jiang Luo, he would never have believed that there were mermaid monsters in the world hiding under human skin.

Jiang Luo was covered in slime, which was uncomfortable for him as he has a slight cleanliness problem. It had just been a crisis and he had held back. But now that the crisis is over, Jiang Luo at least wants to wash his hands and face.

” Li Sha , can I turn on the light?”

Li Sha stood up with his arms around her, leaning back and saying, “Yes.”

Jiang Luo switched on the light and squinted for a while to adjust to the light before he could see inside the room.

The captain’s room was not much different from his in terms of size and arrangement, the only difference being the slime that was everywhere. On the ceiling, on the walls, on the table top and on the floor …… almost gave Jiang Luo the feeling that he had entered the stomach of some kind of monster.

It was hard to imagine that he had just rolled around in all that slime.

Jiang Luo immediately lost the idea of simply cleaning up here.

Li Sha, still holding his hand, hesitated for a long time before saying, “Brother, if you can leave, can you take me with you?”

She said timidly, “I want to go to the doctors so they can heal my daddy. Daddy used to tell me that the best doctors were on land.”

“Of course,” Jiang Luo said, “if I can manage to leave.”

Li Sha’s sad little face finally showed the happy, carefree smile of a child as she wiggled Jiang Luo’s finger and said with certainty, “Brother, you will be able to take Li Sha away from here.”

Jiang Luo raised an eyebrow, crouched down to meet Li Sha and asked rhetorically, “What makes you so sure?”

Li Sha said seriously, “Because brother runs as fast as I’ve ever seen him.”

Jiang Luo, who is the best at pulling his leg and running away : “……”

“…… Thanks for the compliment.”

Jiang Luo stood up, ” Li Sha , where are you going to sleep tonight? Brother will take you back.”

Li Sha did not live with the captain, she only came to this room to get covered in slime when she was in danger. Jiang Luo dropped her off at the door of the room and before parting with Li Sha, he suddenly remembered something, ” Li Sha, how do you know that fish soup is not allowed?”

Li Sha said honestly, “I heard it from my crew uncle.”

She was too young to understand the meaning of the crew’s words and could only barely repeat them to Jiang Luo: “They said that if they ate the fish soup, more fish would grow in their stomachs. All the fish on the boat are males and they try to find material for the females every year, and they say that they breed with them every year and wait for the next autumn to catch them from the deep.”

“What does breeding mean, brother?”

Faced with the clean eyes of a small child, Jiang Luo dismissed it perfunctorily: “It means they are going to be a father.”

Li Sha seemed to understand, “Then it’s two days, that’s when they become fathers.”

The male and female will be mating in the next couple of days?

Jiang Luo’s face fell and he said goodbye to Li Sha without further ado.

Taking humans to breed their offspring and preferring to eat human flesh. Such a race should never be allowed to breed successfully, and female blood eels should not be allowed to return to the deep sea with a bellyful of eggs.

The consequence of letting a female blood eel go is dozens of lives in the bilge, the fry of dozens of fish in one’s stomach.

Jiang Luo did not return to his room, but searched the entire ship.

On the bow deck, he saw the massive 500-pound female blood eel.

The black fish was glued to the floor, a low-frequency cry emanating from its mouth, a much more feminine and delicate sound than that of the male. The blood eel has changed considerably from when it was caught, its bulging head has deflated, the previous head was so large that it must have been hiding the eggs of the blood eel.

Jiang Luo instinctively felt bad as he listened to a shout.

Combine what Li Sha said with the behaviour of this blood eel and it’s clear that it was begging for sex.

And in a boat full of male fish, Jiang Luo can easily imagine what the consequences would be.

The males will go crazy over it and it will become a battleground for the males and females to mate.

Unless there is already a leader within the male fish who decides who will mate with the female, the whole ship will be an infernal hell for two nights.

Jiang Luo stood and waited for a while, thankful that tonight should only be a prelude, the females called for a while and then stopped, no males had yet arrived on deck.

Jiang Luo returned to the room unnoticed.

Lu Youyi is still hiding in his and Ge Zhu’s room.

They spent the day hiding in the wealthy area, probably because there were so many civilians and dozens more had been taken into the bilge that the disappearance of a few of them did not attract the attention of the crew.

This was also expected by Jiang Luo.

After all, even if someone were to escape, where would they go? There was only one Angonese ship on the ocean, and no amount of escape would have gotten away with it. It was only with this contemptuous attitude that the crew did not take it seriously.

As soon as Jiang Luo returned, several people were taken aback by his appearance.

Jiang Luo was used to the fishy smell at the end of his nose when he was outside, and once he stepped into the normal smelling room, he was straight up green from the smell of his own body.

It’s beautiful and expensive on the way out, but stinks on the way back in.

Jiang Luo couldn’t wait to say more and scurried straight to the bathroom.

The people outside looked at each other in disbelief.

Lu Youyi whispered, “Is he in a fish pit?”

Jiang Luo took the longest bath in his life to wash the smell off his body. It was even longer than the one he took after being touched by Chi You, and he only reluctantly stopped when his skin was wrinkled.

I don’t know if it was a psychological effect, but Jiang Luo still felt the fishy smell on his body. To cover it up, he took the rare step of finding a small bottle of perfume in the bathroom and sprayed it on himself from afar.

Now the stench is finally gone.

Jiang Luo walked out in a fragrant breeze and when they saw him coming out, the crowd rushed to ask, “Are you hurt?”

“What’s wrong?”

Jiang Luo was just about to say something when he saw a row of flares and a photo album laid out on the bed, he picked one up in his hand in surprise and looked at it, “What’s going on here?”

Wen Renlian smiled and said, “We can’t leave you to your own devices. While you were in the communications room, Zhong Qiu and I stole a row of flares and took them in case we needed them. Ye Xun and Lu Youyi found this photo album. There are some interesting photos in this album, so open it up and have a look.”

Jiang Luo gave them a thumbs up, his mind half relaxed. He opened the photo album and the first photo was of a slightly familiar crew member and it dawned on him, “This is Cheng Li’s album?”

Lu Youyi nodded, “Yes, Ye Xun and I found it in his room.”

The people who took these photographs have a very special relationship with Cheng Li. In work and life photos, the Cheng Li they see on camera is a far cry from the Cheng Li they see in their eyes, and the rude and aggressive crew member can be seen in the photos with a bit of gentleness and fortitude.

In the front is a picture of Cheng Li, and in the back is a little girl whose eyebrows faintly reflect Cheng Li, who must be his daughter.

The photo of Cheng Li’s daughter is a family portrait of sorts.

The style of this photograph is markedly different from the previous one, which must have been taken by a different person. There is a family standing in the photograph, and in addition to Cheng Li and his daughter, there is a middle-aged woman with an ordinary but infectious smile.

A family standing on the shore with the Angonese in the background behind them.

The photograph shows the Angonese in mint condition, as if it had just set sail, and Jiang Luo can see the captain high up on the deck rails.

Jiang Luo looked closer and saw that the captain was also holding a little girl, Li Sha, in his arms.

Li Sha is wiping her tears from her eyes, her arms are covered in bruises from the beating she received.