Chapter 10: The small town of Siren

The keeper said that the hot water room Bai Liu was going to was a bit out of the way and that a few of the lamps were broken, so he should take care of himself.

He also admonished that there were a lot of random piles of mermaid wax figures over there, so be careful not to bump into them.

The keeper said these words with an impish expression on his face.

Bai Liu walks through the marble columns, which are two to three people wide, in the middle of the road, which is lined with wax figures of mermaids at regular intervals.

The wax figures are of various shapes and sizes, with fishtails on the ground and no expression on their faces, and Bai Liu has noticed that almost all of them are looking out of the window.

It looks as if these mermaid wax figures are trying to escape from here.

The hot pool, at the end of the corridor, had been opened by someone, and the hot water was pouring out of it, and the whole corridor was filled with steam from the hot water, and the wax statue of the mermaid was baking under the steam as if it were melting, dripping wax drop by drop, its body changing in very faint movements.

Bai Liu walks through the promenade as if in a sea of mist, surrounded by mermaids swaying beneath the surface.

Within a few steps, Bai Liu noticed the wax figures of mermaids lining the road, their heads looking out of the window, their necks becoming slowly crooked and deflected, their expressionless faces starting to look towards him.

And the wax figures of the mermaids in front and behind on both sides are moving closer and closer to the middle Bai Liu, melting more and more at a subtle pace that is not easily perceptible.

The vast, deep, European-style building is dark and opaque, and the solitary visitor's feet tread unhurriedly on the smooth floor as the wax figures of mermaids on either side seem to change their stance and expressions with each blink of Bai Liu's eye and move closer and closer to him.

A faint smile appeared on the otherwise blank, dead faces of the mermaid wax figures, their fish tails trailing a trail of greasy candles across the floor.

They are so pale, so flawless, as if they were a group of ghosts frozen in this place that could only move slowly.

Bai Liu mentally counts the number of mermaid wax figures, and every now and then glances back at the things following him to control their movement.

But there are so many wax figures here that usually he stares at the mermaid wax figure behind him and just as soon as he turns around, the mermaid wax figure with a compassionate smile right in front of Bai Liu is already impatient to reach out to him and immediately grab him by the neck.

Bai Liu has calculated the speed at which these things move, and he is basically stuck moving and turning back, and using the columns to deliberately move them around and keep them from forming a circle.

These feel threatening, but the more problematic points are their indestructibility and sheer numbers, making it difficult for him to escape once a siege battle is formed.

As the wax figures of the mermaids came closer and closer to him, Bai Liu noticed that they were slowly transforming from a near-dead state to a living thing.

These mermaid wax figures originally looked like close faces to Bai Liu. The assembly line production of generic European and American wax faces began to change, and the closer they got to Bai Liu, the more the melted faces of these mermaid wax figures became like ...... Bai Liu.

The wax figures of mermaids have an overly curved, eerie smile with faces eerily similar to Bai Liu's, and they move towards him with teeth and claws.

Bai Liu finally reached what the keeper called the hot tub, the yellowing old lavatory sink with its tap top stained with rust-coloured stains, not sure if it was blood or some kind of rust.

The rectangular tin can for boiling hot water stands above the tap and makes the sound of boiling hot water tumbling and boiling.

With the sound of the water rushing in, Bai Liu calmly places the newspaper in his arms and turns back to the sink.

A group of wax figures of mermaids of various shapes and sizes, with faces that resembled his seven or eighty percent, stood in several rows high and low behind him, clustering around him so thickly that they blocked even his path of departure.

Their heads are bowed, the dim light of the museum falling in a haze over their eyeless eyes, and their mouths are tipped with strange, cracked-to-the-corner-of-the-mandibles grins.

The smile was clearly malicious, projecting a creepy sense of menace on their meltingly distorted faces.

These wax figures of mermaids look sullenly and greedily at Bai Liu, who is standing in front of the pool, and Bai Liu is looking directly at them, feeling surrounded by dozens of himself.

The group was hunting him.

Bai Liu thought that just now he had said that these things were not very intelligent and did not have the sense to surround him, but he did not expect that a moment later they would learn to surround him without any knowledge.

What an amazing ability to learn, just like humans.

Bai Liu stared placidly at the group, the hot water behind him already overflowing from the washbasin, but he didn't turn around, or couldn't, for if he did the group would have come at him immediately and he couldn't blink.

He reached his hand behind him and turned off the tap.

Bai Liu blinked and the mermaid wax figures moved up an inch, their faces becoming more and more hideous, but Bai Liu looked at them as if he hadn't seen them, instead stroking his chin thoughtfully and muttering to himself.

"Hatching, is that what it means? The closer I get the more I look like me ...... so the odds are that what eventually hatches will look the same as me ...... Well, the ichor on me is a little heavier when these mermaid wax figures are leaning over, so I'm affected when they hatch, and those townspeople are in hatching in?"

He was unhurried here, but the players gathered in front of his small TV were not as calm as Bai Liu and were sneering.

"At a time like this, still analysing and pretending, I see what he's going to do with a bunch of useless projectors, is he going to show a movie to the mermaids?"

"Tsk, a hundred spirit values, and I thought how awesome it was."

There was another shout from the side, "The rookie player with the torch has broken out! Come and look!"

In a small TV screen two frames away, a male player holds up a blazing torch, gritting his teeth and waving it at the mermaid wax figure surrounding him, shouting at the top of his lungs as he does so, "Go away! Go away if you don't want to be burnt!"

The mermaid wax figures faded away and a cheer erupted in front of the small TV:

"I told you this player could, picked the right prop. One of the weaknesses of mermaid wax figures is photophobia, and a blazing torch is the best prop, can can, charge up!"

"The nod goes to him, and his panel force values are fine, so he could probably make the Rising Stars list with good development later on."

"Eh, I should have known better than to charge that white what's-his-name next door, waste of points, this is the proper seeding ......"

The likes on Bai Liu's mini-TV had dropped to single digits, and the few viewers who were still there were not there to cheer Bai Liu on, they were simply there to watch the newcomer's death throes.

The few remaining viewers could not help but scoff as they saw Bai Liu on TV unhurriedly pulling the three 3D projectors he had bought on sale out of his pocket.

"I can't believe he actually took it out, what's he going to do?"

"Still the torches next door looked so strong that they all receded at once."

The wax figures of mermaids silently close in until their tails are at Bai Liu's toes, standing tall and encircling him in a small, shadowy space, dozens of melting wax hands reaching out from all sides in an attempt to capture Bai Liu as prey.

Bai Liu unhurriedly threw the 3D projectors behind, to the left and to the right of the wax figures, one on each side, and then smiled as he flicked the switch.

Three projections and one Bai Liu are standing in all directions, and the wax figures of the mermaids hesitate for a few seconds and then all stop.

But the audience continued to look on with mockery.

"The mermaid wax figures are not very intelligent though and can't tell the difference between a real person and a projection, the projected human eyes can indeed fool them for a while, but for too long they will be exposed and last ten minutes at most, but ten minutes won't even get them out of here."

A spectator who had just charged up a lot of electric points for the torch player snorted, "And that bright torch he bought, just that one, while it can force back mermaids, it's not as intimidating or offensive to mermaid wax figures as a torch, a torch is useless."

As he spoke here, the mermaid wax figure in the screen receded a little and stared at those projections without moving.

The player who reviewed Bai Liu didn't panic: "Ten minutes at most, just wait, soon these wax figures will react to the fact that these projections are fake."

Sure enough, it didn't take long for the mermaid wax figures to seem to get the insight that Bai Liu's projection was a fake and were leaping around the torch light, ready to come forward.

This audience member gave another contemptuous laugh, "See, I told you this would happen."

The spectator hadn't finished his sentence when he looked at the small TV screen and, dumbfounded, stopped his high-minded analysis.

Like Bai Liu, the three projections on Bai Liu's side also took out strong torches and pointed them at the mermaid wax figure. The four Bai Liu took out their torches and pointed them at the middle mermaid wax figure as if they were about to fire some kind of cannonball.

Bai Liu laughs: "One is not really enough, but four should be enough."