Mermaid Throne

The noon sun scorched the cobbled road. Occasionally, a salty sea breeze blows from the east, making the bells at the entrance of the fish shop jingle. The hot wind is mixed with fishy smell, which is really unpleasant.Even so, the boy sitting at the door looking at the store still dozed off with his chin propped up.

In this small seaside town, noon was usually the rest time, and even the cat that often came to steal fish walked up to the boy's side, nestled lazily at his feet, and took a nap.

A burst of children's cries came from the nearby fruit shop, which disturbed the cat. The boy was flicked by the cat's tail, and finally opened his eyes amidst the earth-shattering howls.

"How dare you make up such a story! It's really a fight!" The faint male reprimand was mixed with the crying, with a little panic and fear.

Tao Yiran opened his eyes helplessly, looked at the sun hanging high outside, and wondered why it took so long to visit the store.

Not long after the crying ended, a child with red eyes and swollen mouth nibbling an apple appeared in front of him, sniffing and asking, "Is there any fish left today?"

Tao Yiran glanced at him, and took out a small sardine from a pile of sardines: "Take your apple instead."

"...It used to be a gift!" The child shouted dissatisfiedly.

"Nonsense, you used to give me unsalable fruits every day." Tao Yiran said coldly to the child who was half his height.

"Now my dad canned all the rotten fruits," the child said aggrievedly, "Besides, aren't we friends?"

"Oh, then I can sell this fish as if it were dried." Tao Yiran withdrew his hand and prepared to hang the fish instead.

"I'll change!" A child less than nine years old is no match for him.You can ask for more fruit, but not fish.

Tao Yiran took the apple with great satisfaction, picked up the place where the child had gnawed with a knife, and squatted in front of the shop to eat it. "Why did your father hit you just now?"

"Have you heard the story of the mermaid princess?" The child also squatted beside him, complaining in a nasal voice, "I just changed the ending of the story, and my dad almost beat me to death."

Tao Yiran is not interested in children's stories at all, but in order to keep this fruit-giving friendship going on, he still tries to maintain his interested expression. "what story?"

"You haven't even heard the story of the mermaid princess?" the child asked in surprise.

Tao Yiran bit the apple and thought for a while: "It's a mermaid princess who dragged the sailing human into the sea to mate, but the human escaped. In order to mate with this human and give birth to a hybrid mermaid with two legs, the mermaid The princess made a contract with the Sea God, and the Sea God gave her legs so that she could go on a boat to find humans, but she must exchange the Mermaid Throne with the Sea God?"

"That's a prince! Not an ordinary person!" The child has an inexplicable attachment to the identity of the protagonist.

"Oh, well, it turned out that although she was exposed by humans after boarding the ship, she still stole human sperm..." "She lied to the prince and spent a wonderful night with the human princess instead!" was vulgarly narrated The blushing child retorted.

"Well, well, I spent a very harmonious night," Tao Yiran continued to recall and edit this story full of deceit, hatred, and racial discrimination while nibbling on an apple. "As a result, the mermaid princess was born with legs Not only did this hybrid child not get closer to humans, but he hated the human child born out of love between the prince and the human princess. That is, his younger brother."

"It's too much, isn't it?" The child couldn't understand because he had a younger brother, "It's not the prince who caused him to become like this, why don't you blame that liar mermaid?"

"That's his mother." Tao Yiran said.

"But the prince doesn't love the mermaid princess at all. She asked for it."

"Yes." Tao Yiran responded perfunctorily.

This is what the mermaid asked for.Such hatred is unreasonable for humans, and it is more in line with the current human mentality towards mermaids.As for the prototype of this ancient story, no one has studied it anymore.

"So what did you change so that your dad chased and beat you?" Finally he gnawed away all the cores of the apple, and the boy no longer had the patience to chat with the little furry boy.

"Didn't the original story end with the mermaid child fighting his younger brother because of jealousy, and finally died alone? I thought this was too embarrassing, so I asked my dad why the mermaid could go ashore to bully the younger brother. The younger brother couldn't win. How about diving into the water and taking his throne? We can be strong too!"

Tao Yiran stared at him with rounded eyes.

This little brat is really a coward.

It is a good wish for human beings to defeat the mermaid, and they still want to dive into the bottom of the water to seize the throne that is loved by the sea god?

Ha ha.

He smiled and touched the head of this child who could be dragged out by a mermaid and hung upside down to dry in the sun: "Human beings are even restricted from going to sea, and they still want to seize the throne? You have to ask your father to buy more fish and go back to supplement his brain." , what should I do if I don’t become even more stupid?”

The child was shocked by his harsh language, and Tao Yiran coaxed him out of the fish shop when he wanted to say something.

Before the real store manager came back, the boy quickly put on an attitude of working. When the store manager Chen Ajiao moved to the door of the fish shop, Tao Yiran was already "diligently" picking stones from the conch.

"Yiran," said Ajiao Chen, who is in her early forties this year. Her husband died a few years ago, and she insisted on maintaining the fish shop until now.The woman has been soaked in the sea fish all year round, and there is always a fishy smell on her body, so she hooked up with a tailor, who sprayed perfume every day that could kill people, "Acheng resigned, tomorrow you will drive the boat alone Let's go to sea."

Tao Yiran replied "Yes" without raising his head.When Chen Ajiao turned her buttocks to find a tailor again, she stood up from the pile of conch shells, looked at the hot sun outside, and made sure that there would be no customers coming to the door in a short time, then half-closed the shop door, turned around and slipped in. inner room.

In the dim room, there is only a single bed for temporary rest and a second-hand TV set on a broken coffee table.

Tao Yiran dug out a book from the pile of old books under the bed, took out a well-wrapped CD from it, and carefully put it in the CD player. " training course.

This is a training CD that Tao Yiran bought from the black market at a huge price. This kind of CD is only allowed to be sold within the scope of "evolved people". When it flows to the ordinary market, it is just a piece of rough-quality recording disc. Even so, Tao Yiran still spent two months of his savings on this CD-ROM of the Evolutionary Elementary Physical Training Course.

"Evolutionary Man" is a specialty of this era.

In the era of rapid brain evolution, human beings have completely forgotten how to survive in the forest.When intelligence fully covers human life, human beings suddenly find that their physical fitness is also deteriorating rapidly.

They can no longer walk more than ten kilometers, can't fight animals of the same size, can't live without the assistance of intelligent machines, and can't survive on this planet alone.

It seems that without these intelligent equipment, they can no longer be called the overlord of the earth.

This panic reached its peak when a new evolution emerged.

Mermaid, the most primitive race, was overwhelmed by ancient mixed blood.They used to be the overlords who lived in the ocean before humans dominated the earth.However, with the evolution of human beings, rare and precious mermaid species began to mate and live with humans out of curiosity. Before the explosive evolution of human technology, purebred mermaids had disappeared with changes in lifestyle and mutual killing of races.

These powerful and cruel mermaid descendants, after the human gene degenerates, the atavistic phenomenon began to show their powerful mermaid genes domineeringly and fiercely. Amphibious, such as strong physical strength, and even some mermaid descendants with purer bloodlines have incredible superpowers.

This group of people moving in different evolutionary directions, no, it should be said that they are species, after dozens of centuries, they are once again called by their long-lost name-mermaid.

Returning to ancestors also shows differences in mermaid offspring, not all mermaid offspring can turn back into mermaids.They call the offspring that only show mermaid characteristics in physical fitness "mermaid species", while the other more extreme "double species of mermaid" is just like the legendary mermaid, with a beautiful appearance and can live in the sea all year round .The appearance of these merfolk is almost the same as that of humans, with only slight differences in pupil color and ears.Therefore, if you don't pay attention, you can rarely distinguish humans from mermaids at a glance.

At the beginning of the mutation, the number of mermaid species was very small, and these mutated mermaids quickly showed their outstanding abilities.Humans, who began to feel threatened, tried to cull these heretics, but the amphibious mermaids quickly retreated to the sea to reproduce and recuperate. 40 years later, in order to retaliate against the raid and siege of human beings, the vengeful mermaid tortured and killed the severely degraded human beings.

The battle between humans and mermaids almost destroyed most of the modern human facilities.The war lasted for five years. Although human beings lagged behind the mermaids in terms of physical fitness, they were superior in that they had a large enough base. They desperately made weapons and used human lives to fill the gap between them and the mermaids. The final result was so tragic that people couldn't bear to look back.

No matter how powerful the mermaids are, a population with a base of only a million still cannot completely dominate the earth. In addition, the estrangement from human beings is increasing day by day, intermarriage between humans and mermaid species has become rare, and the speed of population expansion is slowly slowing down.The five-year war finally ended with peace talks between the two sides.

The human beings who retreated to the inland and the mermaids, the overlords along the coast, seem to have maintained peace for more than 20 years, but the inside is still dark and turbulent.

The degradation of human beings has not been improved, but the advantages of mermaids have become more and more obvious.The history of living together with humans has allowed mermaids to also master advanced technology, but their dependence on technology is far lower than that of weak humans.The complex and dangerous underwater living environment allows mermaids to maintain excellent physiological quality, and the damage caused by humans to the earth also makes mermaids hate it.Mermaids, who depend on water to survive, resorted to various means to force humans to stop most resource exploitation, which eventually led to the re-emergence of handicraft industries in some areas due to lack of resources.

When the mermaids were gradually reaching their peak, the human race was declining day by day, and even the weak became slaves of the mermaids.

However, human beings are not lambs to be slaughtered. Since the degeneration comes from human beings' greed for pleasure, as long as they regain their blood, human beings still have unlimited potential for development.

As a result, a new race appeared, a group of human beings whose life goal was to improve their armed capabilities—evolved humans.

Evolved people are not engaged in production. The greatest significance of their existence is to serve as the human army to protect this population from other populations. Of course, their biggest enemy is the mermaid.

Evolved humans are supported by human beings. The powerful evolved humans even have the same physical strength and responsiveness as ordinary mermaids. With the help of technology, they have gradually become a group of super troops that can compete with mermaids in the cold war.

However, evolutionary humans are not the product of natural evolution of human beings. Most of these evolutionary humans are formed through complex genetic modification or later devil training. Only one person in 10 people can become an evolutionary person. His rarity makes the evolutionary person's status in human society like an old aristocrat. He does not need to produce, but he can firmly control the upper echelons of human society.

The emergence of evolved humans has divided human society into three levels.The top class is the evolutionary people who are outstanding in all aspects. The middle class is the group of people called "subspecies". They have certain specialties, but they are not completely called evolutionary people. people".Ordinary people are humans who have degenerated to the point where they can die from exhaustion after running [-] meters.They have limited physical ability and no special skills, so they can only do jobs at the bottom of society, and even become slaves of mermaids.

The huge differences in each class make countless ordinary people delusional to become evolutionary people.The non-innate nature of evolutionary people has made many people see hope. In order to maintain the population from degeneration, the human government also encourages ordinary people or subspecies to become evolutionary people through acquired training.But why is it so easy?High-intensity training, innate conditions, and the difficulty of picking one out of a million all make it difficult for ordinary people to become evolutionary people.When the death rate was as high as 10%, the government finally began to explicitly prohibit ordinary people from cultivating themselves to become evolutionary people, and they must be trained through designated training halls.

But the high training fee makes most ordinary people discouraged.Evolved people want to maintain their own superiority and deliberately raise the barriers to entry. In order to reduce the competitive pressure brought by ordinary people, subspecies people also acquiesce in such behavior.Ordinary people without any right to speak lowered their heads in frustration before the threshold that was barely touched.

Even so, there are many ordinary people who are looking for various ways to become evolved people in the dark.Underground boxing in the black market is one of the paths that is tacitly approved by the government.As long as you become the underground boxing champion of the year, you can enter the army-now only the evolved ones are eligible to enter.

Tao Yiran used to be a member of the underground boxing ring.

It's just that now this young man can only squat silently in a small and dark room, secretly watching the training video of Evolution Man, thinking about the method of physical training by himself.

The people on the TV have a strong physique, but their muscles are not as exaggerated as the tough guy in the movie. However, every attack has a shocking speed and strength.The training mode is very simple, mainly based on physical combat. After experiencing the consequences of over-reliance on machinery and electronics, human beings began to return to the most primitive evolutionary mode.

Tao Yiran watched intently, gesticulating with his arms in mid-air, he was so excited that his lower back hit the edge of the bed, causing him to grin his teeth in pain.

Even though the room was so small that it was difficult to even stretch, the boy still practiced vigorously.It's just that because of malnutrition when I was a child, I can't gather much muscle on my thin arms.

When he got tired of watching and came out of the room, there were gradually more people on the street.

Baihai City, a small city with a population of only [-], even though it is near the sea, there are still not many people engaged in fishing.The absolute hegemony of the mermaids over the ocean domain makes most of the ocean resources firmly in the hands of these races with unfathomable force values. Humans who go fishing must go through harsh screening before they can get a pass for fishing boats to go to sea. All fishing techniques are strictly restricted, and every time a ship goes out to sea, it is difficult for each ship to haul back more than one ton of fish.

The fish shop where Tao Yiran works is because the owner is a weak widow, so she can’t be a fisherman herself, and the limited funds are only enough to recruit two young men with average experience to drive a small boat to sea.Now that the only partner has resigned, Tao Yiran can only go to the shallow sea area to catch some small fish that are not very valuable.

After finishing the work, Tao Yiran didn't go home first, but went around to the busiest red light district nearby.In front of a deserted bar, he took out the wages given by the proprietress from his pocket today, handed it to the security guard with a stern face at the door, walked down the steep stairs next to the bar, and walked all the way underground.

Different from the deserted scene outside, there was a door at the far end. The moment the door was opened, Tao Yiran was stunned by the sound that almost exploded the basement.

The underground boxing ring is a bloody and violent dark place that exists in almost every city.The smell of sweat, smoke, and deafening noise are unbearable to any well-behaved ordinary people, but Tao Yiran sniffed his nose enjoying it.

He misses it terribly.

I miss it so much that my teeth ache.

With half-closed eyebrows, the deep-rooted gloom in his eyes was covered under the long eyelashes, he smiled self-deprecatingly, and walked over with his hands in his pockets.

A fierce fight is going on in the boxing ring.In the competition of pure hand-to-hand combat, even standing in the audience, it seems that the sound of fists hitting the flesh can be heard. The audience in the audience seemed not satisfied, and they shouted loudly for the contestants who had begun to gain the upper hand to beat each other to death. .

Being oppressed by this hierarchical world for too long, they urgently need a feast of blood to vent their depression.

The referee stared at the player who had begun to lose consciousness, and before he fainted, he blew his whistle in time to announce the end of the game.

The victorious boxer climbed onto the fence and cheered to the crowd with his hands raised.

The snowflake-like banknotes were thrown from the audience to the boxing ring, but the winner didn't care about wiping the coins floating down from his body. He roared, excited that he was about to get rid of this underground castle.

The people in the audience became more and more crazy.

They are too far away from evolutionary people, so far away that it has become a luxury. Only when these ordinary people who used to be like themselves step on the steps of evolutionary people, can they lick a little bit of hope with soothing effect from despair .

Among the boiling crowd, the young man looked up at the people on the ring who were screaming in the rain of money, and heard the deafening shouts and curses around him, the hands in his pockets unconsciously clenched into fists.

Sooner or later, he will go back.