Chapter 97: The Mermaid’s Tears

The newcomer was Zhang Xingmin, and Julia seemed to gain more courage at once. She spoke before Zhang could even begin to reason with her.

“Damin, you arrived at the perfect moment,” Julia said the instant she saw him, and she quickly told him everything the staff had just said.

As for the matter of giving questionable water to the merfolk to drink, to be honest, Zhang Xingmin was angry too. This particular batch of bottled water might not pose an immediate threat to the merfolk’s lives, but it was still unsafe in any case. No one would choose to drink a cold-virus infection every day.

Yet Zhang understood the staff had their own troubles. As early as the previous night he had heard reports of merfolk being kidnapped or of private, unauthorized merfolk-modification experiments. In such a chaotic time, the workers may simply have been too busy. After all, those matters were more urgent than water safety. So he tried to calm Julia and persuade her to cool herself.

Andreas arrived then. He had heard that Julia was arguing with the staff and came in his electric wheelchair as quickly as he could. Seeing Julia indignant, Andreas rushed to explain that notices had already been issued; only when he lacked enough clean water did they occasionally hand out that batch just to wet his throat.

When Julia saw Andreas’s tail looking slack and drawn from dehydration, she no longer cared to continue disputing with the staff. With concern in her eyes, she went to her brother and left with him.

In truth, Julia knew he was lying. The staff here had not delivered water on schedule as the rules required. Even someone like Andreas, who was getting this questionable bottled water, was receiving comparatively good treatment. Some merfolk with no relatives at all had no water at all; when thirsty they drank straight from the pools where they lived.

People might think, fish live in rivers and merfolk are fish too, so what is the problem? But they never considered that these creatures were once human. After years and decades of living as people, they still carried habits from that life; even dirty water could make them nauseous.

They had no real freedom to move about, so they had to endure it all. Since they depended on the staff, Andreas never dared to complain. He constantly flattered and entertained the workers who brought him his water and meals, hoping to keep even a thin thread of value in their eyes. As for merfolk who had no relatives and no one to care for them, the staff truly did not care at all. It was possible for someone to vanish for days without a report ever being filed.

After all, the disappearance of one merperson was not considered a disaster.

That was true: ever since the link between merfolk and resistance to this plague had been discovered, disappearances in the Vienna Merfolk Care Center had become almost routine, and no one thought it strange.

Kidnapping merfolk was, like kidnapping ordinary people, illegal, yet some still did it without fear. Once the Academy of Medical Sciences confirmed that merfolk bodies contained a protein that could help fight this plague, some infected magnates and privileged elites quietly sought out merfolk, extracting that protein from their blood in hopes of prolonging their own lives.

Life for merfolk in Europe had already been miserable before the Vienna center was founded. Before then, these tiny lives were often little more than playthings for the powerful; even today some are still hidden away in private homes to be shown off, used for lustful amusement, and worse. Though the local government repeatedly offered rewards for reporting such acts, it made little difference.

Now merfolk had gained one more value: life extension. That made them even more scarce. On the black market, prices had climbed from hundreds of thousands of euros each to hundreds of thousands, even tens of millions. A strong and handsome Andreas would likely be worth tens of millions.

Even inside the merfolk community, everyone understood their condition. Every day, companions were taken and never returned. And some had heard kidnappers say things like, “Be careful. The buyer has already paid a hundred-thousand-euro deposit…” and so on.

To avoid becoming someone else’s toy again, some merfolk were heartbroken and in anguish. They wanted to weep, but merfolk have no tears; all they could hear was their own hearts bleeding.

The Academy of Medical Sciences, too, was thrilled once it realized the value hidden in merfolk biology. As an official institution, it would never sink to the level of black-market profiteers and strap merfolk to laboratory tables to bleed them dry for medicinal protein every day. Instead, it worked to reproduce the protein itself. Whenever there was progress, it shared the findings with research centers worldwide and sought cooperation.

After touring the nearby laboratories with the inspection team, Zhang Xingmin left them. They were to discuss further collaboration, since technical breakthroughs were not things to be handed to other institutes for nothing. He was not at all worried about the outcome of the negotiations. What concerned him was Julia. When she had left that morning, she had looked so full of resentment.

When Zhang found Julia again, she was still at work in the merfolk care center. The place was so filthy and chaotic that it was hard for her to bear. Andreas’s quarters were a bit cleaner by comparison, but some living areas were so foul that even the air seemed to reek.

As Andreas explained, merfolk do not have human legs, so moving on land is awkward, and their tails cannot remain out of water for long. They can only stay in the pools and move there. Ground-level sanitation, naturally, cannot be maintained properly. The design itself is so poor that even the pool water is out of reach when they need it changed. Even this relative cleanliness was only because Andreas had the nerve to beg others to clean for him.

As soon as he came through the door, Andreas—who had little to occupy himself with—saw Zhang and greeted him with a cheerful smile. Seeing that expression, Zhang felt a trace of envy. In his place, he would never have been able to smile at all.

After watching Julia busily move through the chaos, Zhang suddenly remembered the thought he had had the previous night: inviting Andreas to settle in Water Quarter of Jinling City. He decided to mention it now before he got too busy and forgot.

Julia knew that district. While speaking with Andreas, she had already decided to urge him to move there. At the very least, he could then care for himself. From Andreas’s own demeanor, however, it seemed he could not decide whether to wait for the reversal surgery or to leave for a foreign land.

When he heard that there was a city where he could live freely—one designed with apartments for merfolk and waterways for their movement—the lively Andreas immediately agreed. He even grumbled that his sister had not told him sooner.

So it was settled. Zhang would bring Andreas there on his return trip. The exact timing, however, still depended on the Academy’s response.