The next day, Ye Yuan got up and stood on the deck, gazing out at the sea.
Under the azure sky and white clouds, flocks of seagulls followed alongside the fishing boat.
Using the second-level ability of the Water Control Art, Ye Yuan checked the situation beneath the boat.
A small school of fish swam toward the fishing boat. Ye Yuan wanted to cast a net over them, but seeing how small the school was, he decided against it.
The first haul of his life had to be a good start. The fishing boat continued onward.
Although he spotted quite a few fish following the boat, Ye Yuan was still dissatisfied. The fish were not dense enough, making them difficult to catch.
"Aren't we casting the net? I think the catch here is pretty good," Ye Zhuang asked from beside him.
Ye Yuan merely shook his head. After another twenty-odd minutes, he finally gave the order to cast the net.
This modified fishing boat was equipped with automated machinery. Though there were only a few people aboard, much of the work was done by machines.
After towing the net for half an hour, Ye Yuan ordered them to haul it in. The winch turned, slowly lifting the fishing net. The screeching sound showed how much strain the steel cable was under, and the stern of the boat visibly sank lower.
"This should be a bumper haul," Ye Zhuang said excitedly. Ding Er watched the sea expressionlessly, while Ding Yi continued steering the boat.
The crane slowly lifted the fishing net, and a huge bundle of sea fish appeared before them. There had to be over ten thousand jin in this catch.
There were many mullet in the net.
Mullets had long, slender bodies, cylindrical at the front and flattened at the rear. Their heads were short and broad, with flat upper surfaces and blunt, pointed snouts. They liked to leap and often swam upstream in schools, feeding on organic matter in the seabed mud. The largest mullets could grow to 1.8 meters long.
Mullets were not considered premium seafood and sold for only around fifteen to twenty yuan per jin. Spring was the best season for eating them, and now, in early summer, they were already slightly out of season.
By then, the fishing net had been lowered onto the deck. As the bottom rope was released, the mullets that had been lying still suddenly became fierce, trying to leap back into the sea. The larger ones over a meter long looked ready to fly right off the deck.
Ye Yuan and the others hurried forward, moving the larger mullets into the cold storage first. As the meter-long fish were carried inside one after another, only smaller fish remained on deck. Ye Yuan threw many immature fish back into the sea, as was the fishermen's custom.
After more than three hours of work, all the catch had been roughly sorted.
There were over a hundred mullets longer than one meter and two hundred between half a meter and one meter long, totaling more than eight thousand jin of fish.
Ye Yuan really wanted to exchange the catch for points immediately, but with Ye Zhuang still aboard, he suppressed the urge.
The fishing boat continued onward. Ye Yuan told Ye Zhuang to go rest and instructed Ding Er to prepare lunch.
Ye Yuan spent another three days at sea.
During those three days, they cast the net several times, and every haul was excellent. The largest catch reached fourteen thousand jin, and there were now nearly twenty tons of fish aboard Ye Yuan's boat.
Ye Yuan took out the map and realized he was already very close to international waters. The sea here should be more than a thousand meters deep. He told Ding Yi to stop the boat. Ye Zhuang had been assigned to sort the fish in the hold. The latest haul had been good but mixed, containing all kinds of fish. Ye Zhuang and Ding Er would need some time to sort them, so Ye Yuan planned to dive down for a look.
Ye Yuan entered the sea, and images of the surrounding waters flooded into his mind as all kinds of creatures flashed past.
He came upon an area thick with seaweed, rich in herbivorous marine life. After taking a look and finding nothing unusual, he continued swimming farther away.
Ye Yuan had already descended more than five hundred meters beneath the surface, yet he felt no discomfort at all. Large and small coral colonies grew across the seabed here, including a patch of deep red coral. That should have been red coral.
Red coral generally ranged from 0.5 millimeters to 2 centimeters in diameter. Each polyp had eight feather-like tentacles. Its eight septa were unpaired, with septal muscles growing toward the abdomen and septal filaments shaped like single leaves. It had only one siphonoglyph, located on the ventral side. Its skeleton was mostly internal, or extended from within the body to its surface. It possessed a calcareous axial skeleton with tree-like branches that did not grow in a single plane, ranging in color from pale pink to deep red. Apart from the axial skeleton, calcareous spicules were distributed throughout the mesoglea. It often lived alongside reef-building corals. Its skeleton was dense and brightly colored, commonly used for jewelry or carving materials. The court beads worn by ancient Chinese emperors were made of red coral. It could also be used medicinally to calm fright and improve eyesight. Due to extensive harvesting, its numbers had sharply declined, and it had been listed as a nationally protected first-class animal.
Ye Yuan did not harvest the coral there and continued swimming downward. He did not know how far he had gone before he reached an area with towering seaweed and green, ribbon-like plants, some dozens of meters long and even taller than ordinary trees on land.
Suddenly, several colorful glimmers appeared in the distance. Ye Yuan immediately swam over and, upon getting closer, discovered that they were sparkling glass-like crystals.
These are crystals, right? Ye Yuan wondered.
Crystals were not particularly valuable. Many small handicrafts were made from them.
Niuniu will definitely like these shiny things.
He had already been down there for quite some time and should head back. He might as well bring a few back for the little girl.
He picked out several he thought were the prettiest and returned to the fishing boat.
After he boarded, Ding Yi handed him a towel and looked at the pieces of "crystal" in Ye Yuan's hand.
"Boss, where did you find this Tourmaline? This is good stuff."
Ding Yi and the others were truly humanlike. Sometimes, Ye Yuan could not even tell whether they were robots or actual humans.
When Ding Yi told him that the things in his hand were Tourmaline, Ye Yuan also recalled some information about it.
Tourmaline had the richest variety of colors among all gemstones. Because Tourmaline was a complex borosilicate mineral, metal ions such as iron, magnesium, lithium, manganese, and aluminum could substitute for one another. Differences in the concentration of these ions directly affected Tourmaline's colors and varieties.
Iron-bearing Tourmaline appeared black or green.
Magnesium-bearing Tourmaline appeared yellow or brown.
Tourmaline containing lithium, manganese, or cesium appeared rose-red, pink, red, or blue.
Chromium-bearing Tourmaline appeared dark green.
Among them, azure-blue and vivid rose-red Tourmaline were considered the finest.
Sometimes, uneven distribution of components within the same Tourmaline crystal could also cause color variations, resulting in bicolor Tourmaline, multicolored Tourmaline, or watermelon Tourmaline with red interiors and green exteriors.
Recalling this, Ye Yuan looked at the pieces of Tourmaline in his hand. One was azure blue, while the others were black and pink.
"I wonder how much these pieces of Tourmaline can sell for. Once we return to the inland sea and my phone has a signal, I'll ask Eldest Brother," Ye Yuan murmured.
When Ye Zhuang came out, Ye Yuan handed the Tourmaline to Ding Yi and told him to put it away first.
"Captain, the sorting is finished."
Ever since Ye Zhuang boarded the boat, he had been calling Ye Yuan captain, which Ye Yuan found quite satisfying.
"Let's cast the net once in international waters. Since we've come all this way, it would be ridiculous to head back without casting a net." Ding Yi started the boat, and it sailed steadily toward international waters.
Photoshop: Thank you all for your support. If any brothers have monthly tickets, please vote for Zhijian. Zhijian has not yet received a recommendation notice, so I hope to improve the results a little and get a recommendation spot sooner.
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