“Get ashore quickly!!!”
The sudden roar came from Wade Sorrell on the river bank, Guillamy's father, a skillful carpenter.
The wood carvings he made were very popular among people, especially the children of aristocrats. They could be combined into different things through simple assembly, and those wooden ornaments were the latest styles loved by noble ladies.
Today, Wade realized that he had forgotten to bring lunch after going to the woodworking factory, so he walked back to the cabin at noon to prepare for lunch. On the way, he heard Guillamy's laughter and came over to see him.
This seemingly unintentional glance averted a disaster.
The two children were having fun in the river, but when they heard the roar, they ran towards the shore without looking back.
Philip and Guillamy were very surprised.
"What is that?!"
But the dark shadow in the water was faster than they were. It jumped high out of the water, creating a large splash of water.
It was a huge, extremely ferocious-looking Danube catfish!
Seeing this, Wade took out the wooden spear he carried with him to defend himself against wild animals and threw it at the catfish that leaped towards the two children.
This quick stab was obviously not as powerful as the one delivered by the spearmen on the battlefield. Wade had very little time to prepare for it, and he stabbed it out without even accumulating strength. He was afraid that this huge catfish would swallow Guillamy in one gulp.
Although this catfish does not have scales like other fish, it has a slippery skin and mucus secreted from the skin. Most of the impact brought by the spear tip is absorbed by the tough skin, and slides aside along the skin under the action of the mucus.
This hasty stab did not achieve the effect of passing through the body! But the catfish still felt pain, but humanely showed a very angry feeling.
The catfish's momentum slowed down a bit, but it was still heading towards the children. In a hurry, Wade Sorrell could only fly over and try to hit the catfish with his elbow and knock it back to the river bank.
The moment the two sides touched, Wade knew that something bad was going to happen. This huge catfish weighed about 70 to 80 kilograms, and the impact of its high jump, although the impact was slightly reduced by the previous one, it still hurt like being hit by a sumo wrestler from Japan.
A cracking sound came from the right hand that he did dominantly. This was the consequence of the impact, a fracture.
The catfish was unwillingly knocked into the river.
Wade walked to the shore and checked on the two stunned children first. Apart from some minor injuries caused by bumps from rocks, they were fine. He touched their heads with his intact left hand.
"Gillamy, go and carry my things, and let's go home first. Hello, Philip, you have grown a lot taller."
Wade endured the pain and chatted with him. Guillamy silently carried some tools that his father was carrying and walked in front. Seeing this, Philip followed him back.
They soon returned to the windmill. Puvent rushed forward to help Guillaume take down the things on his back and put them on the ground. He then took out some first aid supplies from the donkey cart and asked,
"What's going on? This hand...hiss...I'm afraid it's broken..."
Wade stretched out his injured right hand for Puwente to check, and said helplessly,
"It's obvious that little bastard Guillaume forgot that I told him not to go in the water. Hey, be gentle, if I hadn't just walked by, hey, these two little bastards would have been swallowed up."
Puwente looked at Wade and asked,
"Is it that bully?"
Wade said helplessly,
"Yes, we haven't caught that bully for so many years. I just saw that the bully has grown to be taller than Philip."
Puwent applied some medicine to Wade's wound and said,
"How about we organize some people to fight it off?"
Wade remained silent, thinking, and then said,
"Maybe we should catch it. There's talk of a group of children disappearing after playing by the river. The only clue is the shoes left on the riverbank. Maybe this bully swallowed the children. It's mating season now, and this beast is too aggressive."
Pwent said,
"Wade, you'd better go to the hospital for your arm. Thank you for saving my son. I can provide you with some resources before you return to work."
Wade smiled and said,
"Damn it, your child's life is only worth so much as my arm. You have to add more gold marks anyway!"
Later, Wade went to a hospital in the city for treatment. After all, this was his dominant hand, and for a carpenter, it would be troublesome if the dominant hand was injured and left with sequelae.
At this time, Puwente organized the local militia to catch the kingfish. Some red-eyed local militia immediately decided to join the fishing. They were the families of the victims of the collective disappearance of children a few days ago. Just when they were ready, an old man living upstream suddenly rushed out and said to the fishing team,
"We can't fish it out! We can't fish it out! Without the Lord River God, we will suffer even more losses and fall into endless despair!"
Puwent frowned and asked politely,
"Old man, what did Lord River God say?"
The local militiamen nearby all laughed, and one of them said,
"It's just a fish. You call him a river god? You must be joking."
The old man was so anxious that his face turned red, he stamped his feet and said,
"If the Lord River God doesn't protect us, the entire Ouzhou will be in great trouble! It's been here for hundreds of years!"
When Puvent heard this, he was a little disapproving. How could there be a catfish that could live for hundreds of years
He said to the old man, "We will just go and take a look. That's all. You can go back and have some rest."
A group of people set out for the Danube River in a mighty manner. They brought harpoons and large fishing nets, but small fishing nets were useless.
The Danube River is currently calm, and people's daily lives depend on this slowly flowing water, so the Danube River is generally clean and free of garbage.
The militiamen first put down a fishing net upstream and fixed it with wooden stakes on the opposite bank. Another group of militiamen then set down a fishing net at the place where the tyrant had committed evil today. They used a trawl net structure with hanging stones underneath.
After both sides were ready, the militiamen upstream gave a signal and began to collect the nets from the bottom up. Since the mesh of the fishing net was designed to target the king mullet, the mesh was much larger than that of a densely packed fishing net, but there was absolutely no space for the king mullet to struggle. This special design was to avoid destroying the original ecology of the river. It would be uneconomical to catch some fry by mistake.
When the fishing nets were finally pulled in, the big fish could no longer hide and kept struggling between the two nets, splashing quite a bit of water.
The Overlord's human-like and spiritual eyes revealed a trace of sadness and anger. These poor mortals had no idea what was about to happen to them.
The excited militiamen rushed forward and worked together to pull the fish to the shore.
Even though it was dragged to the shore, the Overlord was still struggling, trying to get back into the water, but the double layer of fishing net was extremely strong, and the more it struggled, the tighter it became.
The militiamen had red eyes and were crazy at this time, shouting "We caught the Overlord! We caught the Overlord! I told you not to eat my lovely child! I want to avenge my child!", and cruelly stabbed the Overlord's body back and forth with harpoons.
The Overlord's blood flowed out from the wounds all over his body, and under the sunlight, it actually gave people a kind of holy glow.
Puvent couldn't bear to see this brutal scene and turned his head away, but he vaguely saw the anger and sadness in the bulging fish eyes.
These militiamen cut up the Overlord's body, and some of them even took out their daggers and cut off the fish fillets and ate them raw, which attracted others to follow suit.
It was dark and it was raining. In the drizzle, the Overlord's fish eyes looked up to the sky and laughed at these foolish people.
The old man knelt down by the river, kowtowed repeatedly, and shouted, "Lord River God! Lord River God!"
Puvent felt that everything before his eyes was extremely unfamiliar to him. Those simple villagers were so cruel. Thinking of this, his inner compassion made him retreat to a place farther away from the river bank.
The militiamen cut up Overlord's body, but no remains or limbs of the missing children were found, and there were only a few fish and shrimp in his stomach.
Puwente didn't understand whether today's roundup was right or wrong.
See the crying old man, the crazy celebrating militiamen, the injured Wade, and the cut Overlord.
When everyone's attention was focused on enjoying the Overlord's flesh and blood, no one noticed a dark shadow appearing in the river. The dark shadow slowly reached the shore, and people suddenly felt a chill.
It was a kind of gaze. This kind of gaze was neither a peeping gaze nor a reconnaissance gaze, but a gaze that contained malicious intent, just like the feeling of a hare being stared at by a hawk, but with a feeling of enjoying the pain of being slaughtered by the overlord and hating the overlord.
People fled in panic along the river bank, but some greedy people chose to carry the huge body of the Overlord on their backs. When Puvent felt something was wrong, he ran forward without looking back.
Those greedy people felt something entangled their bodies and legs after taking a few steps. One of the brave ones turned back and took a peek, and saw something like a black whip. It was a tentacle of a living creature with large and small bumps on it!
Suddenly, the bumps on the tentacles extending from the river exploded, splashing dark green liquid. The parts of the bodies of those greedy people wrapped by the tentacles felt a burning pain, and the surface skin melted as if corroded by strong acid.
After spurting out the dark green slurry, the lumps on the tentacles turned into eyeballs without eyelids, looking at the world without any emotion.
A man who turned around to take a peek was shocked by what he saw. The only emotion left in his mind was fear. He had lost all reason, no, he had even lost the desire to ask for help.
Fear took over his mind, he dropped the fish in his hand, and grabbed his eyes with both hands, blinding himself. The pain stimulated his nerves, and a cry of "Ah!" became his last words.
Those disgusting and abominable tentacles avoided a few militiamen who had eaten the Overlord's flesh and blood. They were the families of the victims. Their hatred for the Overlord made them eat his flesh and blood raw, but now their lives were saved by the Overlord's flesh and blood.
The weeping old man witnessed all this madness. Common sense no longer existed in the world, and only the fear of the indescribable object remained. He shouted madly, "The river god is dead! The river god is dead! The sealed object has come out! We are all going to die! We are all going to die!"
The horror in the old man's eyes did not belong to any creature he knew. No horror could be compared to it, because any horror understood by humans was nothing in front of it.
Those greedy people were dragged into the darkness of the water by the tentacles, and bright red waves appeared on the surface of the water.
The darkness in the water rose on the surface of the river. It was a terrifying existence, like a giant amoeba made of tar, with tens of thousands of green, pus-like eyes on its tentacles, and its amorphous body exuding a foul odor as it crawled and flowed forward.
As Purvent continued to run forward, obscene whispers appeared in his mind, "Takeli-li! Takeli-li!"
The voice contained emotions such as misery, abandonment, resentment, and loneliness, just like an abandoned puppy, but this creature did not have any of the cuteness of a puppy. Even looking at it would result in eternal damnation.
Purvent's thoughts were immersed in the filthy whispers, falling into the boundless void, wandering in the endless darkness, with only the filthy sound remaining; as his thoughts faded, his actions also slowly came to a stop.
Everyone present was standing or lying on the ground in a daze, only the indescribable creature was eating happily, using its tentacles to pull the humans around it, stuffing them into its liquid body, and then melting them to become its nutrients.
At this moment, a bolt of lightning streaked across the sky and hit the protoplasm-like creature. A large amount of dark green liquid spurted out of its body, along with some human remains that had not yet been digested. It hurriedly dived into the water with injuries and left the Danube.
No one knows where it went, but at the same time no one wants to know, because the appearance of this creature is as deadly to humans as a plague.
A thunder arrived late, breaking the darkness in Purvent's mind and becoming a ray of light that symbolized hope, awakening Purvent from the brink of madness.
Puvent didn't dare to look back at the miserable scene by the river, he lowered his head and returned to the gathering place silently;
The other militiamen who had managed to survive also followed them back trembling. Some of them even lost consciousness and fell to the ground when they reached the village entrance.
The villagers noticed the decrease in numbers and the strange silence, and asked what had happened, but the survivors all refused to mention any more of the incident, because no one wanted to recall the memory and the fear, even if the fear would accompany them for the rest of their lives.
Some curious villagers went to the terrible scene and loudly spread the words of the crazy old man, saying that these were all punishments from the river god.
The next day, a reporter from Umr Daily came to the scene of the crime and took a photo.
He wrote these words with a sad heart and put them on the headlines of the next day.
April 13, 1879
The wrath of the Danube or mass disappearances
There have been cases of children going missing along the Danube River before. People suspected that the catfish in the river became aggressive during the mating season and attacked the children playing by the river.
On that day, more than fifty militiamen went to catch the Danube catfish in the river, but were opposed by the elders in the village.
The old man said that the six-whiskered catfish named Overlord was the river god, and if they killed the river god, everyone would die.
After the successful capture of the six-barbel catfish named Overlord, a large number of people went missing.
A mysterious dark green mucus, some obviously human body parts, and bloodstains were found on the river beach at the crime scene.
We cannot infer from here whether these people are missing or dead, but we can guess that what happened here is terrible.
So far, no survivors are willing to reveal the relevant circumstances.
William Hanser, reporter of Umr Daily
Attachment: Pictures
The kingfish in the picture was cut into several sections, and its bulging eyeballs looked at the sky in a human-like manner with a hint of pity and sadness.