This Damned Thirst for Survival

Before Jiang Luo could even think about it, Lu Youyi pointed to a photo below and said, “This is the one.”

Jiang Luo looks down and sees that it is a photo of Cheng Li and another man.

Another man with a hunched back, scowling, looks at the camera with embarrassment. Jiang Luo looks for a long time, “This is ……”

Lu Youyi leapt up and said, “Doesn’t it look familiar?”

Jiang Luo nodded contemplatively.

Lu Youyi was about to make another stab at the mystery when Ge Zhu ruthlessly revealed, “This is the civilian who was thrown overboard by Cheng Li the day we boarded.”

Jiang Luo said, “Oh …… they turned out to know each other.”

This would be interesting.

“Ye Xun was very observant, “Look at the clothes he’s wearing, they were worn by Cheng Li in the previous photo, he’s either a close friend or a blood relative. ”

“Put it that way, they do seem to have some resemblance.”

Ye Xun nodded, “We were just talking about it, and from the photos, Cheng Li doesn’t look like a man who abandoned his wife and son. He threw someone he knew off the boat on the pretext that he didn’t have a ticket, but he wasn’t trying to save his life.”

Lu Youyi concludes, “In short, he must know something.”

Jiang Luo said, “That makes sense.”

Zhuo Zhongqiu kicked him in the shoe and teased, “How are you today? Lu Youyi didn’t really tell you that you’d fallen into a fish pit, did he?”

Jiang Luo tugged his lips up and said with a leathery smile, “Pretty much.”

The few people who were laughing happily stopped smiling and looked at him incredulously.

Jiang Luo rubs his faintly painful forehead and lies down casually on the bed, while Kuang Zheng hastens to move him.

“I learned a big secret today,” Jiang Luo dropped a shocking bombshell in a calm tone, “I almost know what a blood eel is.”

……

From the conversation between Dan Nier and Sonja in the duty quarters to what Li Sha told Jiang Luo, Jiang Luo was able to say it word for word, thanks to his excellent memory.

As he spoke, he sorted through the information in his head. After going over the day’s experiences, he even made a joke about it.

“The two males in the duty quarters look stupid.”

To say it’s stupid is more like the fish mind not fully transformed to the human mind.

They are still affected by appetite to the brain, just like wild animals. Neither a mere fish nor a mere human being.

But several other people had been so completely stunned by what he said that they didn’t even notice his joke.

Lu Youyi closed his open mouth with difficulty, “You mean to tell me that most of the crew on our boat are males and the blood eels caught are females. As if that wasn’t enough, there will be males and females mating over the next two nights, and then the pregnant females will be released back into the sea to wait for the next year to hatch their eggs?”

Jiang Luo was pleased: “You summed it up very well.”

“WTF?” Lu Youyi broke down and crouched on the floor clutching his head, “Holy shit!”

Sai Liaoer looked at a pensive Wen Renlian and a stony-faced Ye Xun and cautiously asked Jiang Luo, “Can’t we just kill the female fish?”

“We are trying to kill the female, before she has mated,” Jiang Luo says patiently, “but once we touch the female, the males in the boat will riot and, unprepared, we will be up against dozens or hundreds of males at every turn, and this will become their killing The field. We, and the civilians, would all perish in the mouths of the males.”

Sai Liaoer thought about it, “So we need to send a flare to get the police to come before we kill the female?”

Jiang Luo nods his head.

“But the female and the male will mate no later than tomorrow night, we don’t have much time left,” Ge Zhu took a map of the sea from the side and skillfully took Jiang Luo’s copper coin and paper and pencil and began to gauge the direction of the police boats, “South away from 9, East Zhen 3 …… flow holds the quicksilver, west is the mainstream, west against 7 ……”

Wen Renlian stood by the window looking at the starry night in the sky, and after a long time, took a piece of paper and folded it into a long strip to use as a scale, “I’m with you.”

They did not have a compass, so they had to use the stars in the sky and the currents on the sea to find the position and time of a particular person or event.

Jiang Luo was not a child of metaphysics, and although he had progressed at an astonishing rate, he was still deaf and blind when he heard Wen Renlian and Ge Zhu’s words. -He is still deaf and blind, listening to Wen Renlian and Ge Zhu.

He waited patiently for a while and was about to fall asleep to the precise chanting of numbers when Ge Zhu woke him up with a shout of joy.

“Right here!”

Jiang Luo woke up with a start, jumped out of bed and went over to see the map of the sea with two circles drawn in black pen, one for the Angonese and one for the police vessel.

The distance between the two ships was not close, Ge Zhu wiped off his sweaty head and took a pen to measure the distance between them, “This distance, at the very least, will take four or five hours, right?”

Wen Renlian, also sweating profusely, looked at the map, pondered for a moment and nodded slowly, “More or less.”

“Four or five hours?”

Ye Xun frowned, “Not a good idea.”

“It’s not easy,” Zhuo Zhongqiu said, holding his chin, “think about it, we have to kill the female before she goes to sea with her belly full of eggs, and before we can kill her, we have to send a flare five hours in advance. But the flare is so conspicuous that once it’s sent, the whole boat can know about it.”

“That means our battle doesn’t start the moment we kill the female, it starts the moment the flare goes off.”

Jiang Luo’s brow furrowed.

“What are you thinking about?” Wen Renlian asked Jiang Luo.

Jiang Luo said to himself, “I wonder, with the blood eels having such a hard time reproducing, would these males really willingly trade their females with the rich?”

“Coincidentally, I’m not far off from what you’re thinking,” Wen Renlian said with a smile, “but I’m thinking from the perspective of the rich.”

Jiang Luo turns his head to Wen Renlian and listens.

Wen Renlian said softly, “Those rich people are more and more black-hearted and greedy for money, so when such a good means of enrichment is put in front of them, will they really be willing to be a customer instead of mastering the conditions for blood eels to survive and raise blood eel fry artificially?”

“The police have been poking around for a long time, and have poked into the ship three times and always failed ……” Looking at the others looking at him, Wen Renlian shrugged, “You know, I have some shady sources.”

“Not only do the rich people honestly provide the blood eels with everything they want, sustenance, money, they also dutifully keep their mouths shut when they get back to shore and keep the blood eels’ secrets. Letting the news that the blood eels can live long and young reach the ears of those who deserve to hear it, and then making those people new clients of the blood eels …… tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk.”

Jiang Luo was thoughtful, “So there’s something else going on here that we don’t know about ……”

But no sooner had he spoken than a sudden shaking occurred in the boat.

The people in the room hastened to hold each other up. The shaking seemed to be an ordinary fluctuation in the current, which seemed uncommon at sea. But Jiang Luo suddenly thought of the female blood eel on the bow deck, and his eyes fluttered open and he immediately peered out of the window.

Jiang Luo looked up at the sky and saw that the night sky, which had just been clear, was now covered with a thick layer of dark clouds.

A fishy smell rolls in from outside amidst the fierce sea breeze blowing through.

Not good.

Jiang Luo turned around in an instant, grabbed whoever’s jacket was on the coat rack and rushed out of the room, “Don’t follow me, I’ll be right back.”

As quickly as he could, he threw on his jacket and ran for the bow of the boat. Once he reached the bow, Jiang Luo saw a male trying to approach the female blood eel, who crawled back in disgust, seemingly not wanting to mate with the male.

The male is rude and rusty, obviously making advances on the female for the first time, and he is cautiously looking around for scents, a little wary of other males, not even caring about Jiang Luo’s human scent.

This male, apparently, broke the rules of blood eel courtship.

The other males don’t move at all, but he comes. The female does not want to mate, but he wants to force himself on her.

If Jiang Luo hadn’t just had a bath and was extremely sensitive to the fishy smell, he wouldn’t have expected such a robber male to come out of nowhere and try to finish mating tonight.

He laughed with living exasperation, “You’re such a gentleman fish.”

The male has pounced on the female, who is twice as big as the male, and she dodges sluggishly, but not as nimbly as the male.

Jiang Luo was never going to let the female blood eels spawn back into the sea tonight, and he strides forward, arm raised, giving the yin and yang ring a gentle shake in a determined attempt to stop this one-sided deck bedlam.

But the next instant, his wrist was gripped by a pale, slender hand.

A voice, familiar to the core, came from behind me with a deliberately false to the core surprise and a low teasing voice, “So you have a hobby like that.”

Jiang Luo turned expressionless in an instant.

“A peek is a peek, and you want to interrupt them.”

The evil spirit laughed. Jiang Luo’s jaw was pinched and he was forced to look at the two tangled and tumbling blood eels, “I’m even a little curious about your hobby, why don’t I watch with you?”

His tone grew grim, “By the way, let’s see when you’ll get tired of watching this hobby again.”