The Third Level Below Deck Stunned Ling Chu

At the entrance to the third level below deck.

Ling Chu inserted the brass key into the lock. The mechanism turned.

The magical patterns on the door went dark in rings, starting from the center. With a low scrape, the heavy iron door slowly swung open.

A wave of stench, so thick it made them nauseous, surged through the gap.

All three instinctively held their breath.

As the door opened wider, magic lamps sensed their presence and lit up one by one. Pale light spread along the walls into the depths, gradually revealing what had been hidden in the dark.

When they saw what lay before them, all three froze.

The first things they saw were rows of enormous transparent tanks, each two or three meters tall and filled with murky, pale-blue liquid.

The things suspended inside looked human, but they were not.

In the tank nearest the door floated an adult man.

His head, chest, and arms still retained roughly human shapes, but below the waist, his body had become a thick whale tail.

Gray-black skin stretched tight over the tail's muscles, and its flukes nearly filled the bottom of the tank.

The next one was even stranger.

Its upper body was that of a slight woman, but its lower half was a massive dark-red shrimp tail. The join at her waist was badly twisted, as though someone had forcibly stitched together two creatures that were never meant to share a body.

The person in the third tank was so altered that their sex was impossible to tell. More than a dozen octopus tentacles of varying thicknesses grew below their waist.

The tentacles floated motionless in the liquid. Their upper body had changed too, with round fleshy lumps bulging from their chest, shoulders, and arms.

On closer inspection, those