Chapter 1 As Katrina Said

As Katrina said, the ocean is vast, and it can swallow everything.

Seventy percent of this planet's surface is ruled by the ocean. The sirens are the most low-key, friendly, and non-contentious race on this planet, yet they rule the most expansive kingdom. They have lived in these deep seas for ten thousand years. The world above has seen countless changes, with numerous dynasties—even dynasties of "gods"—rising and falling over those millennia. Glorious civilizations have been lost in their decline, and countless artifacts have fallen into the deep sea through various coincidences, eventually becoming the sirens' collectibles.

These inherently low-key but curiously active sirens are undoubtedly the planet's most dedicated collectors. They collect almost every sunken object they find in the sea as treasure, probably due to their ancestral heritage: as early as the age of chaos in Aioi, the sirens of the deep sea gradually learned about the "world above" by picking up debris falling from the surface. Since then, the sirens have always favored those strange things that fall into the sea from above. Their talent for collecting even amazed Lily: the husky girl usually just liked to bring all kinds of stones home... well, collect them, but the things collected by the sirens of Nasaton were far superior to Lily's pile of broken stones!

The collection is arranged chronologically, with the more modern items on the outer shelves. Hao Ren slowly walked deeper along this "frozen timeline," feeling as if he were browsing the planet's history.

On the most recent shelves, the most common items were various human-made implements. The newest was a small ring from a nameless, heartbroken girl on the west coast of America. The ring's owner sadly threw it into the water, and a siren who happened to be swimming below happily retrieved it, played with it for a few days, and then sent it to the collection. A little further along, he saw a metal plaque with beautifully florid letters, a relic from a shipwreck. Further on, Hao Ren saw torpedoes and shells, as well as periscope parts from a submarine and a broken metal plate: these things came from World War II.

He even saw boiler fragments from the Bismarck—personally retrieved by Katrina. When the Bismarck sank, the siren queen watched the brilliant fireworks above from the deep water. Finally, she cut a piece of steel from the Bismarck's boiler as a souvenir of this observation of humanity.

Further on, the collection became more ancient and began to include some strangely intriguing items. The captain's log of a Spanish merchant ship and a pirate's scimitar were placed together, interspersed with fragments of fishing gear swept into the sea by tsunamis, as well as oddly shaped telescopes and strange gadgets that served no discernible purpose, almost like magical instruments. Hao Ren's attention was drawn to a cylinder made of platinum, engraved with exquisite patterns depicting nine-headed monsters, waves, and hexagram symbols. Katrina, like a tour guide, introduced the object before him: "This is the 'Gold-Seeking Cylinder' of the great pirate Bosserba. He was the last pirate captain who understood black magic. Through this special telescope, he could see any ship carrying gold from thousands of miles away on the sea. He became wealthy beyond measure, but in the end, this pirate captain was choked to death by a chicken bone in his captain's cabin, and his pirate ship was swallowed by a storm not long after."

"That era was shrouded in mystery and darkness," Vivian said as she placed a small golden-decorated dagger back on the shelf. "Sailors were the easiest to be bewitched by black magic because they were far from land, and thus far from the influence of the church and demon hunters. Those superstitious and daring 'sea people' were always happy to discuss stories of magic and curses. So after the end of the mythological era on land, the influence of 'magic' continued for a long time in the ocean."

Hao Ren nodded thoughtfully, continuing to move forward along the timeline. He noticed that the items on the shelves on both sides gradually became simpler and cruder—he had just passed the bright and brilliant period of human civilization and was gradually approaching the more primitive and ignorant Middle Ages. Shabby fishing nets and old sword fragments became the main exhibits on the shelves, mixed with more and more crude items related to magic, as well as some even more surprising historical relics. An ugly round stone and a pile of messy wooden fragments were placed on a separate stack, with a line written on the sign next to it: Human King Richard, attacking Cyprus with a catapult.

"Do you know how much these things are worth?" Hao Ren couldn't help but think of Katrina's previous statement that this collection hall was "not very important." His eyes widened, and he questioned the siren's values. At first, when he saw several soldiers around the entrance of the collection hall, he thought the place was heavily guarded, but now he felt that the place was wide open: the sirens only sent four sentries to guard here, and only used an antique iron gate to guard the treasure house!

"Important?" Katrina didn't feel anything. "Anyway, they are all things that people in the land world threw away and don't want..."

"I reckon at least half of them weren't actively thrown away..." Lily stuck out her tongue. "Shipwrecks and sea disasters are all accidents, okay?"

Katrina gently waved her tail, looking blank: "Probably... more or less the same thing."

Hao Ren felt that he couldn't communicate with this siren queen in terms of values, so he curled his lips and turned to swim forward. After passing those simple and crude medieval relics, he found that the things on the shelves became exquisite again.

The crude creations of humans became less and less. A fishing fork used by a fisherman became the last human symbol in front—of course, according to the timeline, this fishing fork should be the first human item collected by the sirens. Further on, they were all things that could not have been manufactured by human society back then:

Exquisite machines made of metal, strange devices made of crystal, colorful crystal crowns, delicate scepters that shone constantly, and various other wonderful products that clearly did not conform to the characteristics of human civilization. Hao Ren was stunned for a moment and then realized that he had reached the age of mythology.

He looked back and found that he had only advanced less than a fifth of the distance along the long exhibition shelf: in this ten-thousand-year history, it was almost just a fragment.

"Humans have only dominated this planet for this long," Vivian quietly looked at the crude human relics and the bright and beautiful alien "artifacts." The contrast between these two things, separated by only one display rack, was astonishing. "It's amazing. If you go back five hundred years, humans still had to pray every night that demons would not come and take their children away. If you go back one thousand five hundred years, humans were still afraid of werewolves or blood clans suddenly breaking into towns every day. If you go back two thousand five hundred years, they were still kneeling and worshiping brutal alien gods. But now, the only masters of this planet are them. Their creations only occupy one-fifth of the position here, but they have already occupied the entire planet on the surface."

"Those who don't seek progress will eventually be eliminated." Hao Ren shook his head.

"This bow is Artemis'!" Vivian suddenly found something she recognized. It was a silvery longbow with a flowing luster. "...This bow was lost after Mount Olympus fell into a space storm. I didn't expect it to fall into the sea."

Lily found a heavy trident with a black iron texture and a faint blue light at the tip on a shelf not far away. She exclaimed in surprise, "Katrina! Isn't the trident your siren equipment? Why is it thrown here too?"

"That's not the siren model, that's Poseidon's. He once tried to break into Nasaton, but was trapped on the seabed by the distortion field around the starship. Later, he used his trident as a bargaining chip to negotiate with the sirens, and we let him go back," Katrina said, shaking her head gently. "We are friendly, but that doesn't mean anyone can come and disturb us."

Vivian was a little surprised: "Poseidon's trident is with you? I didn't know he lost his weapon—Poseidon used the trident to fight against demon hunters during the Olympus apocalypse."

"Then I don't know. Maybe he has many tridents. After all, it's a shameful thing. He wouldn't publicize it if he lost his weapon," Katrina shrugged. "The world on land is too chaotic. We don't know much. We didn't even know there was a 'god' of the ocean until that bearded man who called himself the sea god came to make trouble. Sirens don't care about these messy things."

After a while, Lily exclaimed again: "Hey, why is there a shoe sole here?"

"That's Zeus's slipper."

Lily: "..."

The relics of the Olympian gods aroused greater interest among the crowd. These ancient artifacts still retained some power to this day, and one could vaguely glimpse the former prosperity of Zeus's family. Hao Ren curiously wandered among these antiques. Suddenly, his gaze was attracted by a gray-white object that looked like a sculpture pedestal.

"Hmm? This thing... why does it look a little familiar?"