The Bizarre Detective Agency

Chapter 231: Flipper Prints

Lu Li left some markers on the beach and set out to find food.

He could handle the first task as he went, but the second was a different story. The barren island had no edible plants or animals left. And it wasn't as if wild cans of food grew on trees here.

That left only one option: the sea.

Leaving the warm shelter, Lu Li felt the cool sea breeze wick away the heat clinging to his body. He left the empty can by the spot he'd set up to collect water, took off his boots, and carried them as he headed toward the shore.

He walked along the coastline. Icy waves trimmed with white foam lapped at his feet, swirling around his ankles and erasing his footprints as they retreated.

The roar of the waves was deafening, but all Lu Li could see was a desolate expanse. Other than seashells, not a single living thing stirred on the sand. It seemed that life in the ocean, just as on land, had ground to a halt.

Perhaps there was a problem, but it couldn't be that severe. After all, the fishing boats from Port Roadster still set out to sea every day.

After walking about two hundred meters, Lu Li spotted a small, silvery fish, about the size of his hand, on the pale sand. It was long dead and already starting to rot, making it inedible.

Lu Li picked up the fish by its tail and kept walking. It might come in handy. If not, its stench might at least deter any predators from approaching his shelter, assuming there were any.

Roughly five hundred meters later, Lu Li reached the end of the beach. Following the curve of the shoreline, he rounded the island and found himself on its flank.The landscape changed here. Dark outcroppings of reef dotted the tawny sand, growing more numerous the farther he went.

These reefs were just the tip of the iceberg; most of their mass was hidden beneath a layer of sand and pebbles. After stubbing his toe on a hidden rock, Lu Li immediately pulled his heavy boots back on.

At the water's edge, sea snails clung to the base of the reefs. Lu Li pried one off, but the shell was empty. He plucked off a few more and finally found one with a living creature inside.

Lu Li put it back. If he found nothing else, the snails could stave off his hunger, but eating too many was out of the question.

He moved on. The reefs became so dense he had to navigate around them. From a distance, this part of the beach looked like a surface speckled with black dots—an unsettling, even frightening sight.

But here, an unexpected gift awaited Lu Li: a small pool, encircled by the reefs.

The pool lay at the edge of the sea, roughly ten meters long and wide, but only about twenty centimeters deep. It was empty of fish.

However, on the surrounding rocks, a high-tide line was visible several centimeters above the current water level.

It was low tide now, but at high tide, the pool would briefly connect to the sea.

If he could lure fish into the pool at high tide, some would be trapped when the tide went out.

This could become his primary food source.

Lu Li still had the stone shard with him. Using the nearest reef as a cutting board, he sliced the silver fish into small pieces and tossed them into the pool.

Ripples spread across the water's surface, and then all was still.

The tiny pieces of fish drifted slowly to the bottom. Lu Li took off his boots again, circled the pool, and built a small dam out of sand to ensure the pool retained as much water as possible when the tide receded.

It didn't take long. Within minutes, the channel connecting the pool to the sea was partially blocked by a wall of sand several centimeters high, leaving only a narrow opening about half a meter wide.

The water in the pool grew cloudy from his efforts, but he knew it would clear up soon enough.

He returned to the reef, pulled on his boots, and after one last glance at the pool, continued his survey of the island's coastline.

He circled around to the northern side of the island, directly across from his shelter, and once again emerged onto a regular sandy beach, free of the unsightly reefs.

The beach here was narrow, a little over thirty meters wide, and it felt as though the sea and the forest were nearly touching.

Lu Li was walking along the water's edge, still searching for food, when he suddenly spotted a set of tracks.

They were just a few meters away, so faint he might have missed them if he hadn't been looking closely. The prints led from the sea, across the beach, and into the forest.

Lu Li cautiously scanned his surroundings before approaching the tracks. Up close, he could make out their distinct shape and saw a few more haphazard prints scattered nearby.

The prints looked like they'd been made by flippers. Lu Li placed his boot beside one for comparison. The flipper print was larger than a human foot and carried a fishy stench. Some of them still held traces of deep-sea silt.

Lu Li counted twelve sets of tracks on the beach, leading both to and from the water. That meant there were no more than twelve of the creatures.

The tracks were fresh, likely left within the last few hours.

Lu Li looked back. His own footprints trailed back the way he'd come, but the rising tide would soon erase them.

The good news was that he hadn't seen any such tracks near his cliff-side shelter.

The creatures with the flippers hadn't reached the other side of the island yet. But if they returned, they would easily find his shelter—the island was only a few hundred meters across.

Lu Li decided to follow the tracks. He needed to find out where these creatures came from, where they went, and most importantly, whether they would return.

But just as Lu Li took off his boots, about to step into one of the flipper prints, a sharp sense of unease stopped him. It felt as if something terrible would happen if he set foot in those tracks.

Lu Li decided to trust his intuition—it had grown sharper as his Mind Level had fallen—but he couldn't just walk blindly into the woods.

If the flippered creatures possessed any intelligence, leaving such obvious tracks would be a foolish move.

After a moment's thought, Lu Li backtracked along his own footprints—which the tide would soon erase anyway—and made his way to the reefs on the eastern side of the island. From there, he picked his way across the rocks into the forest, looping back toward the spot where he'd first seen the tracks.

The traces of silt were still visible on the withered grass. Lu Li followed them, careful to avoid the muck, but the deeper he went into the forest, the fainter the trail became, until it vanished completely.

Lu Li continued in the same direction for another hundred meters before the beach and the sea came into view again. He stopped.

Having lost the trail, Lu Li went back to the flipper prints on the beach. He continued his circuit, walking along the border of the forest and sand. A few minutes later, having circled the entire island, he was back at his cliff.

The flipper prints were confined to that one stretch of beach. He found no other signs of the creatures, nor any clue as to why they had come ashore.

The discovery soured the earlier satisfaction of finding the tide pool.

Lu Li decided against leaving any obvious markers. If rescuers came, they would search the whole island regardless.

He checked his water collector, confirmed it was still dripping steadily, and returned to his shelter.

He decided he should try to hollow out the shelter a bit more and find something to cover the entrance, just in case. But that would have to wait until after he'd slept.

As Lu Li crawled back inside, he felt the chill leave the surrounding sand and stone, which now radiated a gentle warmth.

He tossed a few damp logs onto the embers, knowing they would smolder for a long time. Then, Lu Li curled up in the farthest corner of the shelter and drifted off to sleep.