The fishing man wasn't stupid. To guard against accidents, he tied a hemp rope to the bow of the boat — if anything went wrong, the people on shore could pull the rope and drag the boat back.
"You two stay on shore and keep watch. The moment I raise my lamp, you start pulling." He switched on the fishing lamp he'd brought along, took a deep breath, and jumped onto the small boat.
The water's surface was pitch-black. Nobody knew what lurked beneath, and the sight was more than a little unnerving.
His body swayed along with the boat as the fishing man slowly sat down, placing the fishing harpoon within easy reach, then clamping the lamp between his legs. Only after all that did he pick up the oars.
"Aren't you going to think this over some more?" Zhang Dapo stood guard over the hemp rope on shore. He genuinely feared the fishing man might not come back — after catching so many fish, ending up swallowed by one would be a rather grim fate.
"Some fish get more active the later it gets. The Fish King only bites at night, which means it's exactly that kind of fish. The longer we wait, the more dangerous it becomes." The fishing man forced himself to look calm. He gripped the oars with both hands and slowly rowed away from shore.
"This guy's really courting death." Chen Ge rarely commented on others like this. He wasn't much of a swimmer, and if it were him, he certainly wouldn't go out there now to retrieve a bobber.
He wasn't afraid of evil spirits or vengeful ghosts, but looking at the undulating black water, he felt an inexplicable sense of dread.
It was almost instinctive — a voice inside his head warning him that something was down there beneath the surface, that this reservoir was dangerous, that he should stay away.
The fishing man was pulling farther and farther from Chen Ge and Zhang Dapo. The problem was, the bobber was drifting even farther with the current.
At first it had only been six or seven meters from shore, but now it had drifted past ten.
The fishing man sat with his back to the others, having cast aside his worries, and rowed with all his might toward the glowing bobber.
The vast reservoir was eerily quiet. On the shore, Chen Ge and Zhang Dapo both held their breath, watching the fishing man.
They had both seen the Fish King take the hook. They knew something monstrous truly lived in this reservoir.
The night was deep and heavy — no stars or moon, the sky blanketed by dark clouds. The reservoir's surface was equally black. Sky and water gaped like a pair of enormous open mouths, and the fishing man was rowing with everything he had toward the depths of one of them.
"Almost there." Sitting in the boat, the fishing man fixed his eyes on the glowing bobber not far away, clenching his teeth and forcing himself not to look at the surrounding water.
"Nothing will go wrong. The Fish King was startled — it should be avoiding the boat right now. When the police came out at night to fish up corpses before, this thing steered clear." He consoled himself in his mind, his hands working faster and faster, not daring to waste a single moment.
The silence around him was overwhelming. All he could hear was the splash of oars striking the water, a sound that made him inexplicably agitated.
"The bobber seems to keep drifting forward. This current is working against me. But it's fine — the rope is long. All I have to do is grab it before it goes taut."
One end of the hemp rope was tied to a mooring post, the other to the boat's bow, linking the small craft to shore like a safety line.
Perhaps because of the current, the man and the bobber maintained a constant distance from each other.
The boat rowed farther and farther out, and gradually Zhang Dapo sensed something was wrong: "He's more than ten meters past us now, but the longest rope I have in the shed is only ten meters. Did he tie several ropes together?"
Puzzled, Zhang Dapo reached down and grabbed the hemp rope submerged in the water. He gave it a tentative tug and met no significant resistance.
"Oh no!"
He cried out, frantically pulling the rope back with both hands, only to discover that the line connecting shore to boat had been severed at some point!
"Come back! The rope's been bitten through!" Zhang Dapo panicked, shouting at the top of his lungs toward the fishing man.
Chen Ge hadn't expected this turn of events either. He examined the broken end of the rope — the edges were jagged and uneven, not cut by a blade but rather torn apart by something that had bitten clean through it.
"To chew through a hemp rope in such a short time — this 'Fish King' is no simple creature." Chen Ge ran his fingers along the frayed edge. The rope gave off a faint, fishy stench, likely from being soaked in water for so long. He paid close attention to the break and noticed that the rope near the severed end was covered in dense, overlapping tooth marks.
"It doesn't look like a single fish bit through it. More like a whole bunch of fish swarmed it and tore it apart." Something about those tooth marks struck Chen Ge as odd, though he couldn't quite put his finger on what.