Chapter 340 – The Snail Picker

Chapter 340 – The Snail Collector

Another wave splashed down, and the fallen boy was held down into the water, his limbs struggling and convulsing.

The sea there was clearly just above his knees, but he couldn’t get up.

Those around him heard the boy’s struggling movements and stopped moving again, rising to look in the boy’s direction, but no one reached out to save him.

Between the sinking and the floating, the boy’s occasionally exposed face was calling for help. But no one saved him, and the rest of the group didn’t even remove the black scarf from their faces.

They just looked in the direction the boy’s voice came from, with numb grief on their faces.

Saul, who was not covered in the black scarf, naturally saw what was happening.

The rope around the boy’s waist had broken at some point. A transparent hand tugged at the rope from the direction of the deep sea.

Therefore the boy who fell down, when he tried to climb up the rope to the shore, was actually taking a step towards the even more terrifying deep water.

Saul’s face went cold.

The transparent hand was not the arm he had seen between the waves, as pale as a dead man’s.

It was a 0th rank sorcery, the mage’s hand.

A faint magical vibration came from it, and Saul searched for an even weaker fluctuation of spiritual power in it.

When he turned his head to look in the direction where the mental energy was coming from, he saw a male and a female sorcerer apprentice in the shadows at the bottom of the cliff.

The man was tall, strong, and expressionless; the woman was leaning on the man’s chest in a birdlike manner, twisting her head around and looking at the boy struggling in the sea with a smile on her face.

Just as the boy’s struggles were getting weaker and weaker, Saul suddenly moved his finger.

The man-hungry cold seawater suddenly transformed into gentle palms, holding the boy’s back to lift him up and out of the water.

It wasn’t until the boy stood up in a panicked and somewhat confused state that the hands reemerged as seawater, lapping at the boy’s thighs one at a time.

Saul’s act of saving the boy naturally caught the attention of the two apprentices.

The man remained expressionless as he looked over, while the woman rolled her eyes unabashedly.

But they made no further moves.

Obviously the murderous act just now was also just a whim, and they did not want to clash with another strange sorcerer because of it.

The mage’s hand in the sea was also dispersed, and the boy stood still, finally feeling for his rope that had snapped.

He licked his dry lips, which could not be moistened even by seawater, and whimpered a low, “My rope is broken.”

Because of the choking, his throat was so dry that he sounded like a harsh ghost hiding in the darkness.

After a few moments, someone finally responded to him, “My side is the shore.”

The man wasn’t lying to the boy, he was indeed stepping on a sandy beach with no seawater.

But the sea breeze and waves distorted his voice, making it impossible for the boy to tell exactly where the speaker was standing.

He fumbled for two steps and nearly slipped again.

Because of the struggle he had just been through, he had come to a deeper place, and could have drowned if he had not accidentally fallen.

It was too dangerous!
It was with difficulty that the boy managed to regain his footing amidst a flurry of waves. But he had already lost his bearings again.

Finally he clenched his teeth and blood began to flow from his taut lips.

He carefully straightened his head, then lifted a corner of the black scarf from his face.

He didn’t dare to look at the sky or the sea, just wanted to quickly scan his surroundings to determine the direction of the beach.

However, no sooner had his eyes turned 30 degrees than he saw the beach and a man standing on it fully shrouded in a gray cloak.

The man was standing near his companions who were picking up conchs with him, but they apparently hadn’t noticed his presence.

Looking at the other person’s dress and temperament, he must be a sorcerer.

The boy shrank his shoulders in some fear, but he suddenly thought of the hands that had just suddenly lifted him up.

Those hands were so warm, compared to the cold sea water, they were like a winter fireplace.

The boy bowed deeply in Sol’s direction. As he bent over, his face was wet again from the splashing waves.

“He’s kinda smart.” A smile appeared on Saul’s face as he looked at the boy who bowed to himself and almost all but buried his head in the sea.

“Zo, pull him over.”

Little Algae got the order and swiftly flew over, curled up the boy’s waist, directly lifted the person up, leaped out of the sea, and flew in Saul’s direction. When he was just rolled up by Little Algae, the boy struggled for a bit, but quickly quieted down again, and was honestly carried in front of Saul.

“Sorcerer-sama.” The boy fell straight to his knees with the force of his descent, resting his forehead against the cool sand.

“Get up, I have a few questions for you.”

The boy hesitated, he had met wizards before, but they had made him kneel and answer back.

Or rather, didn’t care what position he was in.

But thinking about what Saul had just done to save him, he chose to get up in a heap.

“What are you guys picking up?”

“Back to my lord, we’re picking up black conchs.”

There are actually black conchs here?

The black conch was also a sorcery material, but it wasn’t considered precious in the sorcerer world and wasn’t very useful.

Nonetheless, because it was associated with sorcerers, it became a rare delicacy in the eyes of ordinary people.

The dish was also made in the wizard’s tower, but Saul was not used to eating seafood and would rarely order it.

The most delicious part of the black conch was one of the internal organs inside the conch, but eating too much of it would cause hallucinations.

Some rich people also use it as a hallucinogenic drug, using it to harm others and occasionally themselves.

Since there were black sea snails here, Saul understood why people would risk their lives to catch the sea here.

“Do you know how often the soul tides occur here?”

Although he had already asked these questions to the rich merchant Bond once.

But the perspective of a rich merchant looking at things was definitely different from the perspective of these people who risked their lives to catch the sea.

When he heard the word “Soul Tide”, the boy’s body, which was facing the sea, trembled again.

“Back to my lord s words, it has happened …… almost ten times in this year. It happened twice in the last month alone.”

Has it all become twice a month? It’s not too frequent, is it?
“Have you ever seen a soul tidal wave? How harmful is it? I mean …… will people die every time?”

“Back to your lordship,” the boy pursed his dry lips, “People die every time …… My father was swept up in it just last month.”

Saul stalled.

A random person was asking about the person in question.

In the rich merchant Pound’s mouth, in the first few years, the frequency of soul tides was low, only once or twice a year, and before a ship entered the harbor, it would receive a signal from the shore, anchor out overnight, and still enter the harbor normally the next day.

However, in recent years the frequency of the tides had increased, and there were no longer any ships that dared to dock here.

In Pound’s mouth, the complaint was more about the fact that the economy of Bluewater Bay was not as good as it used to be without the support of the harbor, but the soul tides did not bring many more casualties as a result.

And in the boy’s mouth, they, the fishermen who originally lived by the sea, were even more forced to return to the sea to support themselves after the depression of Blue Water Bay.

But even such a dangerous job as picking up black conch was a condition to join.

The boy’s father was a conch picker before he was killed, which is why the boy had the opportunity to inherit the job.

After listening to the boy’s story, the color of the sky became deeper and deeper.

The wind began to pick up at sea.

One by one, the people who had been picking up conch in the shallow area tugged on the rope and quickly returned to shore.

It was only after they had walked onto dry land that those people pulled off their black scarves that blindfolded them.

Only then did they realize that the original boy had returned to the shore and was still talking to a mysterious person.

These conch collectors didn’t dare to get close enough to leave, they could only turn their backs to the sea and shiver in the cold wind.

“…… Well, you go back, I have no more problems.”

Saul had already roughly understood the frequency of the soul tides occurring from the boy’s mouth, and didn’t let him stay any longer.

But the boy looked at those behind him, and actually turned his head again, summoning up a lifetime of courage.

“My lord, please my lord, I have two sisters and three brothers, can you, can you see if it is possible for them to become your apprentices?”

(End of chapter)