2. Land of the Mer

Perhaps this was due to enhanced comprehension I gained from the 7 leaf clover earlier.

One of the doors from the closest wooden but opened and she ducked me away behind a large boulder.

The new woman seemed to be of the same specie, except she had a pink scaled body and her eyes were a pristine red. How was I supposed to gain any DNA information of them? Perhaps I could cut a small wound across her forearm and collect some of the blood when we get faraway from the rest of her tribe?

The two spoke rather animatedly for a while and I listened in, trying to get a better grasp of the language. It was as if a little baby again, trying to understand how words were formed from sounds, and what sounds were used when.

Except, something within me, was helping me process everything faster. I doubt it was only the clover's effects, no, it was Kaiju too. It was akin to a powerful supercomputer after all.

And much of language was all about pattern recognition and identifying the context.

"And oh, by the way, Chief Undine was asking why you didn't take part in luring the sailors here the last night. Be sure to head to her hut after her afternoon nap. Ok bye then Seraph."

Huh. I was finally understanding their conversation.

Moments later, I and Seraph were moving again. For whatever reason, she was hiding me from her tribe and taking me to the coast.

"So Seraph—"

"Oh, so you can speak our language after all," she looked at me accusingly, "then you should also know how much danger you're in. The land of the merfolk is not for humans to trespass."

"Why are you saving me?" I inquired.

It was honestly puzzling.

"I'm half human myself. It's a long story, you don't wanna hear it. Just know that I sympathize with your kind."

Now that I looked at her again, she did seem to have lesser scales on her body than the one she talked to earlier.

She pulled me to a stop and we ducked behind a large tree this time. As her eyes were set on watching more of her kind pass by, I pulled out my dagger and cut a small piece of bark from the tree and chewed upon it.

It was surprisingly soft.

'Identifying the flora...

Specie: Unknown

Extracting DNA information...

Extracted.'

Could I talk to Kaiju through my thoughts? No harm in trying.

'Kaiju, what are the effects of this tree?'

'Effects: none'

Guess not everything had effects. But I myself wasn't interested in knowing anything apart from the effects. Saving the information was Kaiju's job after all.

The tree did have a sweet fragrance though.

Soon we were on the coast and she began digging through the ground, only to reveal a perfectly well made wooden boat.

"Huh? What is this doing here?"

"I hid it," she bit her lip, "got from one of the human sailors I lured here, and stowed it away to escape from this place someday."

"I don't know your backstory, but why don't we leave together?"

This was a completely unknown world with dangers I wasn't sure I was equipped to deal with, and having someone from this world as my guide would make my mission much easier. Not taking her blood would be a small price to pay for that.

I pushed the boat into the water, and took the oars in my hand. One of them looked damaged. Shit.

"You wanna come or not, Seraph?"

She seemed to hesitate quite a bit.

Hesitation killed. Always. No war nor battle could be won if you hesitated.

"I'm just assuming here, but I guess your human parent isn't on this island but probably out there somewhere. Is that why you wanna leave?"

Her head snapped up and she jumped into the boat.

Glad that did the trick.