Mermaid Effect 《人鱼效应》 Chinese BL Translation by: 黑猫白袜子

Chapter 14

In the year 1959, U.S. nuclear submarines had been frequently operating under the ice of the Arctic Pole⁠— it was better able to confront the then Bigwig Soviet Union.

However, at the time, no one would have even thought that nuclear submarines, apart from their intimidation factor in wars, were able to take humanity to areas they had never explored up until that point. Underneath the Arctic Pole's outer layer of ice that was millions upon millions of years old, a predator at the top of the food chain in ancient times was lying dormant.

At the very beginning, people just felt that the sheer amount of nuclear submarine accidents happening in this time was strange⁠— Americans thought it was the Soviets. However, after a period of time, the information gathered from the Soviet side surprised the American side⁠— the people of the Soviet Union also thought that those accidents were the work of the Americans.

But, at the time the coordinates of the two submarines were separated by a distance of nearly one hundred kilometers.

Finally, the Americans found it at last⁠— an extremely beautiful and extremely terrifying creature.

It appeared to resemble a massive fish, of course, just from afar... there are five sharply-pointed bones in its tail, its head had two to four pairs of eyes, and a strong, as well as powerful tentacle, could be shot from its mouth that could easily entangle the submarine propellers, crushing them to the point of being unrecognizable.

It has a special, disconnecting-type motion system with special muscle structure that makes it impossible for them to ever experience exhaustion. In addition, the hollow fin spines cooperate with those muscles, making them unbelievably nimble. The outer skin is composed of a multi-layered compound constitution of chitin and calcareous material, which was far stronger than any material that humans could make at that time. The mucus secreted by the epidermis was initially determined to be extremely poisonous by humans. It was not until after many years of research that people realized that it was not a poisonous liquid, but rather an extremely high concentration of viral aggregates, even the most trivial scratches can infect its prey. The physiological tissue dissolves under the infection of the virulent virus. For the mucus of this type of life form, it's viral polymer reaction is so abnormally strong that the majority of normal people are unable to determine its true composition. In the darkness of the bottom of the ocean, their blue-green fluorescence is practically like the bright Christmas lights hung up by the Grim Reaper for a celebration.

Well, by this point, it appeared to be nothing more than just an ordinary creature from the bottom of the ocean... but very soon, everyone finally noticed its bizarreness.

It looks like some kind of bony fish, but it has the regenerative properties of a Cnidaria. It takes less than twenty-four hours after cutting it in half for two good-as-new fish to show up once again in front of humanity... At the same time, due to the fervent attacks they received from weapons, they evolved an even harder outer shell with a subsidiary even thicker buffer on the inner layer.

(TN: Bony fish, Osteichthyes (taxonomic class including most fish) Cnidaria (animal phylum including jellyfish and sessile polyps))

A kind of creature that regenerates and evolves in an extremely short time.

"...we call these things the 'original species'," Simon said to Ryan. "In 1972, the Soviets came across a small settlement of 'Sirens'. According to the original data at the time, there were only about three nearby, and it was precisely those three things that easily broke the K-19 nuclear submarine into pieces. The funny thing is that the Soviets had still thought that at this point, it was the work of an American submarine. From then on, the government started wanting to breed them like biological weapons. After all, they are much more useful than monkeys carrying a bottle of the Anthrax virus on their backs."