In the year 323 of Blue Star, more than three hundred years had passed since humanity evacuated Earth and settled on Blue Star.
On Blue Star, humans discovered a species on the brink of extinction: merfolk.
Deep-sea sirens were apex predators whose appearance resembled that of merfolk.
They were naturally combative and brutally bloodthirsty, and no species was off the menu.
Lan Ai was the leader of the siren clan. As his name suggested, he was a hopelessly lazy couch potato. Several hundred years ago, fed up with the clan’s constant fighting, he left and struck out on his own.
He came to Blue Star and found a stretch of water to live in alone.
When he got hungry, he caught small fish, shrimp, and seaweed right outside his door. For hundreds of years, he never once left home.
The fish and shrimp stopped coming near, and he’d long since nibbled all the seaweed outside his door down to the roots. With hunger reducing him to skin and bones, Lan Ai had no choice but to go out hunting.
For miles around, there were no fish or shrimp, only grass to chew. Lan Ai was so hungry he could barely swim.
Just as he floated belly-up in the water, pretending to be dead, a delicious box fell from the sky.
To taste that delicious food again, Lan Ai swam out of the deep sea and discovered that two new species had appeared on the planet where he’d once lived alone:
humans, who made delicious boxes, and merfolk, who were fed by humans until they grew plump and healthy.
Lan Ai wanted a human caretaker too.
So he filed down his claws and fangs, put on a shell bandeau, and dyed his hair red with red seaweed to disguise himself as a mermaid.
Shen Yizhao, the richest man on Blue Star, bought a seaside villa to recuperate from a psychological illness.
One day, someone knocked on the villa’s front door.
Shen Yizhao opened it and fell silent at the sight of Lan Ai sitting on the steps, neither man nor woman, neither human nor fish.
He was having another episode...
Shen Yizhao closed the door without a word.
At his doctor’s recommendation, Shen Yizhao went out for a night of fishing.
Lan Ai, who had been lurking in the water for ages, bit the hook, then swallowed the fish that had been competing with him for it.
Shen Yizhao reeled in his line without much interest.
Lan Ai grinned as he was hauled out of the water, his teeth smeared with blood and stuck with fish scales and bones.
Shen Yizhao threw him back into the water along with the fishing rod.
His illness seemed to be getting worse.
Later, after following his doctor’s advice to adopt a mermaid to cure his illness, Shen Yizhao struggled to crawl out from under the rutting, nest-building siren.
Quack!
That doctor was definitely a quack!!
Doctor: ?
*
Siren gong × psychologically ill shou
P.S. A mutually doting couple, a goofy romance with no logic. I’ll revise it before posting.
Blurb dated 2024.01.05
Theme: What suits you best is what matters
