Chapter 188 — The Sea Witches' Excavation Plan
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 3
Dark red blood gushed from the wounds; muscle and hide grew winding outward, rapidly coalescing into slender little tentacles marked with eerie patterns and bright edges, thrashing madly before the sea witch.
The patterns on the tentacle's surface gleamed, shifting through grotesque and outlandish forms as it twisted and writhed. Any ordinary mind would be driven mad by those patterns; even the stoutest mortal hero could not face them and walk away unharmed.
The sea witch captain stared blankly at the tentacle, made a bold hypothesis, calmly analyzed the situation, and decided to greet it in return.
And so her body in an instant dissolved and re-formed, her shape shifting in the blink of an eye into a tentacle identical to the other, which likewise began to writhe and curl swiftly across the seafloor.
An indescribable tentacle and a sea witch's mimicked tentacle performed a frenzied dance of ecstasy across the seafloor for a full ten minutes. The two reached no consensus whatsoever—and meanwhile the three sea witches who had finished their excavation had already swum over.
One of them, shouldering a shock cutter, poked the mimicked tentacle standing erect on the seafloor with the tip of her tail: "Captain, didn't you just say not to play too wildly with the Great Squid..."
The mimicked tentacle popped back into the sea witch's form with a puff, looking rather embarrassed: "I thought it was greeting me..."
Another sea witch flicked her tail curiously: "By the way, the Great Squid often has tentacles twisting this way and that... what does it actually mean?"
"Who knows. The deep-sea scholars have always thought it's some kind of communication signal, but after all these years of decoding, nothing's come of it. I suspect they just twist around for no reason, like seaweed."
"No, it's definitely communication—we just can't understand it," said the sea witch with the cutter, utterly serious. "Otherwise why do those land folk get so excited whenever they see these tentacles? And they even shout at them... That proves there's communication!"
The sea witch captain thought it over, gave her serpentine tail a flick: "Who cares. Cut this one off and take it with us—serves it right for popping out on its own."
The sea witch with the cutter started up her device, but before cutting, asked with a hint of anticipation: "So... can we eat a bit of it?"
"E... the reactor fuel should be collected by now... All right, we can eat a bit. But only a bit!"
"Yay~~"
The remaining sea witches cheered and rushed toward their "lunch."
Meanwhile, in the Cecil lord's manor, Gao Yang and Pi Yun's discussion about the sea witches had finally come to an end.
Pi Yun stroked his beard: "On the whole, the sea witches are just such a legendary creature. There are only a handful of sighting reports, and every recorded account fails to stand up to scrutiny. Their history is older than humanity's; they dwell in the eastern reaches of the endless ocean. They may occasionally come ashore, but most of the time they do not leave the deep sea, nor do they communicate with humans or other land races. Sea witches in the ocean are dangerous and guard their territory rigorously; any voyage passing through their domain invites attack—though now that all ocean routes have been canceled, that is nothing to worry about."
Gao Yang knitted his brows, looking at the knight's biography in his hand, and gave a faint sigh: "A legendary species, is it... If only I could find one sea witch to talk with. Well. Let's set that aside for now—those biological tissues I brought back from the Kant domain, have you examined them? Any progress?"