The old lady thought for a moment, then added, "Do you know about red tides?"
"Yes, but I've never seen one."
Actually, he had seen them in his previous life. Blue tears were a type of red tide too; they just looked prettier.
Red tides were made up of plankton, and their colors varied with the species of plankton involved. Most were red or reddish-brown, but sometimes they were grayish-brown, brownish-yellow, blackish-brown, blue-green, and so on.
"Red tides happen every few years, but the worst one was thirty years ago. That was also the biggest one we'd had here in years. The seawater all around turned orange-red, and fish, shrimp, crabs, and shellfish kept floating to the surface without stopping for several days. The seawater stank during that time. Nobody in the village dared go fishing, and it was the same in the surrounding villages."
"According to the old fishermen back then, red tides were caused by all sorts of toxic algae. They release toxins or gather on the fishes' gill covers. That's how the fish in the sea suffocated or got poisoned to death. Even the fish that survived carried toxins. For about a month, nobody around our town dared eat seafood."
"And those toxic algae-on the day the red tide started, the water had only changed color at first. But after just one night, the entire surface was densely covered with all kinds of toxic algae. The sight scared the villagers half to death. For a whole month, we ate only vegetables grown in the fields. We didn't dare touch anything from the sea."
"Then what happened? How long did it last?"
He had encountered quite a few red tides aboard fishing boats in his previous life, but they had always been detected in advance, and the boats