The water rolled with startling speed, covering the distance from the horizon to the shore—perhaps a few kilometers—in under a minute. I marveled at how this velocity far exceeded the Qiantang River bore tide, yet the lake showed no sign of rising water; only a single surge of waves rushed in from afar. In any normal lake, this would be considered supernatural.

As I wondered at the phenomenon, the wave reached us. Xiaoshu was the first to touch the churning water. She immediately leaped up as if stung on the sole of her foot by an insect, crying out in pain and scrambling onto the bank. Following her lead, the moment the wave reached my ankles, a sensation like a bird's peck shot up my calves. This pecking rapidly escalated into a violent gnawing, sending a piercing agony through my entire body. I too spun around and fled back to the shore.

Away from the water, I lifted my foot to inspect the damage. It was awful! Several deep gashes marred my calves, my own blood mixing with the murky water of the Sea of the Damned as it flowed down. I looked back at the water surge; strangely, it hesitated in the shallows, refusing to advance further.

"It’s the Damned Fish!" Xiaoshu murmured.

I sat down, pulled my leg toward me, and indulged in a moment of self-pitying dismay. The wounds indeed looked as if they had been inflicted by some kind of animal bite. Last year, when my older sister first started working at that newspaper office, the company organized a family gathering. As her only younger brother, I naturally joined her colleagues' spouses for a holiday at a hot spring resort. The resort offered many therapeutic treatments, but the most engaging was a pool dedicated to fish therapy. It was filled with small, finger-sized fish swimming in water kept around twenty degrees Celsius. Every one of these little fish had teeth. Once you dipped your feet in, they would swarm, nibbling at your skin with their fine, tiny teeth. Of course, being only finger-sized, their teeth couldn't be very thick; they merely tickled the skin without pain or bleeding, making the experience quite pleasant. Reportedly, this therapy effectively removed dead skin layers. However, I had once been bitten by one or two fatter, larger fish that caused a noticeable sting. I suspected that the tiny fish in the therapy pool and the Damned Fish currently appearing in the Sea of the Damned shared a common ancestor. If those little fish at the resort were just a bit bigger, with slightly sharper teeth, eating people would be entirely within the realm of possibility. Therefore, next time anyone visits a hot spring, be exceedingly cautious of these fish; it’s entirely possible that one or two Damned Fish are lurking among them. When you dip your feet in, these creatures swim over and leave your flesh riddled with bleeding pits, just as Xiaoshu and I now are.

"What should we do? If only we had our compression suits," I asked Xiaoshu, simultaneously regretting the loss of those suits.

"The water route is impossible; we’ll have to take the mountain path," Xiaoshu replied, glancing toward the tall cliff beside us.

"If we go by the mountains, how likely is it that we’ll run into spiders again?" I still felt the terror of last night’s human-spider battle, touching the indented scars on my chest. I was highly reluctant to leave the protective haven of the Sea of the Damned.

"I don't know. It seems they are creatures that enjoy revenge," Xiaoshu admitted.

She was right. The spider swarm attack last night brought to mind the first time we encountered the mermaids at the Sea of the Damned. The mermaids had initiated the conflict then, too. One first tried to charm me and Wang Jue, only to be subdued by Hou Dayong. Hou Dayong spared her life, but instead of stopping, she sought an opportunity to ambush him, only yielding after Wang Jue stabbed her with a dagger. But when she returned to the Sea of the Damned and gathered a host of mermaids for revenge, we realized these beings knew no reason. They start the trouble but forbid retaliation; once you fight back, they become relentless avengers, piling hatred upon hatred until you feel overwhelmed and have no choice but to flee that place quickly. It appears the spiders we clashed with last night share the same ethos as those mermaids; taking the mountain path will undoubtedly be another adventure.

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