Mu Xingchen now remembered the sunken ship from earlier and asked, "Then what was that enormous sunken ship Xiao Yu and Shuishui saw before?"
Lin Hanzhi glanced at him, his tone a little gentler than when he addressed the other two youngsters. "That was a quarantine ship. I only made that connection after the bullet comments reminded me."
Faced with Mu Xingchen's increasingly innocent, bewildered gaze, Lin Hanzhi explained patiently, "Shuishui said the entrances to that ship's cabins were boarded shut, and most of the remains inside had strips of cloth covering their faces. Those were all emergency measures ancient people could take against an epidemic: stuffing the infected into old ships, leaving little or no food and water in the cabins, then sealing the cabins completely and letting the ships sail out to sea with the wind, isolating the plague."
"But the villagers might also have taken inspiration for that method from the Sea Lord Incarnation... After all, everything bad had to be sent away. The sea was accommodating; it could carry everything away. The mass emergence of Man-Faced Conches was probably also due to that batch of people's bones, blood, and flesh. The Sea Lord regained more power from the hundreds or thousands of lives he harvested, and began to stop attacking indiscriminately. Instead, he focused on selecting pure yin souls, improving the quality of his meals to achieve his goal of destroying the seal..."
[Okay, okay, we've finally pieced together several centuries of history in this stretch of Min Di's sea.]
[What the hell do you mean, quality of his meals...]
[So the villagers thought they were sending the Sea Lord away, but they were actually saving him?]
[How is that not another application of the Sea Lord's ability to confuse things? Sigh.]
[Then what's with the