157: Chapter 157 Dragon King, Your Seafood Has Preservatives

Gu Changan stopped, his leather shoes sinking into the wet, soft mud of the tidal flat with a sticky squelch.

The surrounding crowd was kept at bay by the Special Police using cordon tape.

Sea King clutched the rusty iron fork tightly in his hand, maintaining a grinning, cheeky expression on the surface, and even deliberately pointed his phone camera at Gu Changan.

He wanted to display his unflappable "Sea King" demeanor in front of twenty million fans.

"Officer, I caught these by my own ability while beachcombing; they're all-natural and pollution-free."

Sea King thumped his fish fork into the mud with a loud thud.

"Is it against the law to accept nature's gifts?"

Gu Changan did not respond to him.

His gaze fell on the large red plastic bucket at Sea King's feet.

The bucket was filled with so-called "trophies."

There were mantis shrimp as thick as an arm, king crabs the size of plates, and several double-headed abalones the size of an adult's fist.

These were all things Sea King had just "caught by hand" from this murky, muddy pit in front of his livestream audience.

Gu Changan bent down, reached his gloved right hand into the plastic bucket, and fished out the largest abalone.

The abalone shell was covered in black mud, looking exactly like it had just come out of the water.

Gu Changan pressed a few times on the abalone's foot with two fingers.

The flesh was stiff, showing no signs of elasticity.

Then, he brought the abalone to his face and sniffed it gently.

A pungent chemical odor instantly assaulted his nostrils.

It was the acrid smell of preservatives.

Gu Changan tossed the abalone back into the bucket, where it hit the bottom with a dull clatter.

The sound didn't resemble a living creature at all; it sounded more like a rock.

"Nature's gifts?"

Gu Changan picked up the walkie-talkie on his chest.

"Chen Xiaobei, have the Market Supervision Bureau's lab technicians come over."

Several technicians in white uniforms immediately stepped forward, carrying portable spectrometers and chemical testing reagent kits.

Gu Changan pointed at the seafood in the bucket.

"Nature is quite thoughtful, isn't it? To prevent the seafood from spoiling, it even soaked these abalones and crabs in formalin overnight?"

Sea King's expression froze, and the smile on his face became extremely unnatural.

But he quickly adjusted himself and loudly defended himself to the phone camera.

"Family! Don't listen to his nonsense! These are definitely wild, high-quality catches! This is a miracle of the ocean! Some people from inland don't understand the rules of beachcombing at all and are just spouting rubbish!"

The comments in the livestream were already beginning to split.

"Who is this police officer? He looks so professional."

"Formalin? Holy crap, that stuff is used to preserve corpses!"

"I knew it, how could there be Australian blue lobsters on an inland tidal flat? Has this Sea King been playing us for fools all along?"

"Don't rush to pick a side yet, let's see what the police say."

The technicians on-site worked extremely quickly.

They cut off a small piece of abalone meat, put it into a test tube, and added the reagent.

The originally transparent liquid quickly turned deep purple within a few seconds.

The technician checked the colorimetric card and looked up at Gu Changan.

"Director Gu, the formaldehyde levels are severely exceeded, with a concentration over three hundred times the edible standard. If anyone ate this, they'd be straight into the ICU for a stomach pump."

Gu Changan turned his head to look at Sea King.

"You just said in your livestream that to celebrate your 'busting the bucket,' you were going to eat these seafood items as sashimi later?"

Sea King swallowed hard and took half a step back, his waterproof pants sticking to the mud and water.

"I... I was just exaggerating, you know, for the livestream effect."

"Fine. Since it's a 'miracle of the ocean,' let's test the waters that birthed this miracle."

Gu Changan beckoned to those behind him.

The veteran expert from the Fishery Administration Bureau walked over, carrying a water quality analysis kit.

He wore reading glasses and used a glass measuring cup to scoop up a cup of murky, muddy water from the large puddle at Sea King's feet.

He then took out a high-precision electronic salinity meter and inserted the probe into the measuring cup.

The numbers on the LCD screen jumped a few times before finally settling on a value.

"0.01%."

The veteran expert shook his head and poured out the water in the measuring cup.

"This is standard fresh water. This tidal flat at the Yangtze River estuary is still dozens of kilometers away from the actual sea, and the salinity here is extremely low."

The veteran expert then picked up a thermometer and the salinity meter, inserting them into the shell gap of one of the so-called "wild king crabs" in the bucket.

"Yet, the salinity inside this crab is as high as 3.5%, a product of a standard deep-sea, high-salinity environment."

The veteran expert pushed up his glasses and stared at Sea King.

"Simply put, these high-salinity deep-sea creatures of yours wouldn't survive more than five minutes in this freshwater pit. You're pickling seafood with sea salt in a freshwater pit—aren't you afraid of choking these 'nature's gifts' to death?"

With the evidence conclusive, the test data was projected directly onto Sea King's livestream via Chen Xiaobei's portable device.

The lies were ruthlessly exposed.

The livestream was instantly flooded with comments of abuse and demands for refunds.

Sea King's face turned from pale to green, and his forehead was covered in cold sweat.

He knew he had been caught faking, but he wasn't willing to let it end like this; he still had one last bit of clout to chase.

There was still a "man-eating shark" in that puddle that he was planning to wrestle.

If he jumped in and staged a fight with the shark, he might be able to divert attention; even bad publicity is publicity.

Just as he was preparing to force a dive, a violent splash suddenly erupted in the center of the puddle.

The huge black shadow he had called a bull shark was no longer swimming as fiercely as before.

It slowly floated to the surface.

A white belly flipped over, looking exceptionally glaring in the murky, muddy water.

Gu Changan's expression sank instantly.

That wasn't a shark at all.

It was a Yangtze finless porpoise over a meter long.

Its originally smooth, grayish-white skin had been crudely painted over with black industrial paint.

On the porpoise's back, a piece of black plastic foam cut into a triangle had been forcibly tied on with wire to disguise it as a shark's dorsal fin.

The wire was deeply embedded in the porpoise's flesh, oozing dark red blood that spread into the muddy water.

The porpoise's eyes were tightly shut, and it was twitching weakly.

It was dying from extreme oxygen deprivation and high-concentration paint poisoning.

The air pressure around Gu Changan seemed to drop to freezing point.

The surrounding Special Police tightened their grip on their riot shields, and no one dared to speak.

"Medical team, get down there and treat it immediately!"

Gu Changan's voice was very low.

Two wildlife emergency experts in waterproof isolation suits, carrying oxygen tanks and first-aid kits, rushed directly into the knee-deep mud pit.

They struggled to push the porpoise to the edge of the puddle.

The veterinarian immediately used sterile gauze soaked in saline to wipe the industrial paint around the porpoise's blowhole.

The thick paint had completely blocked the porpoise's blowhole.

The porpoise let out an extremely faint, mournful cry, similar to a baby's wail.

"Director Gu, the situation is very bad."

The veterinarian's hands were covered in black paint and mud.

"Prolonged application of inferior paint has prevented the skin from sweating and detoxifying, and combined with the blocked blowhole, it's suffering from severe oxygen deprivation, and its organs are beginning to fail."

Gu Changan walked up to Sea King.

Under Gu Changan's gaze, Sea King felt his legs turning to jelly.

"Faking for money shows you have no bottom line."

Gu Changan pointed at the dying porpoise on the mudflat.

"But to create a gimmick, you tied wire around a national first-class protected animal, coated it in industrial paint, and used it as a prop for your grandstanding."

"Sea King, the nature of this has changed."

There was no inflection in Gu Changan's tone, but every word hit Sea King like a heavy hammer.

"According to Article 341 of the Criminal Law, anyone who illegally hunts or kills precious or endangered wildlife under national key protection, in serious circumstances, shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than ten years."

Gu Changan raised his wrist to check his watch.

"For these fifteen years, are you ready to decide which prison you'll be sewing in?"

Sea King panicked completely.

Faking would at most get his account banned and a fine, but abusing a first-class protected animal meant real prison time.

He couldn't be caught.

In his mind, he was frantically calling for the "Super Beachcombing System" that had changed his destiny.

[Warning! Host is facing a serious legal crisis, please evacuate the danger zone immediately!]

[System points have been deducted.]

[Skill activated: Water Escape (Low-level).]

[Duration: Five minutes.]

As long as there was water, he could swim away like a fish, and even if the police had speedboats, they wouldn't be able to catch him.

Sea King glanced at the mud pit behind him, which was over thirty meters long and wide, with water deep enough to submerge his thighs; it was a blind spot connected to the main channel of the Yangtze River.

Once he dove into this mud pit, he could escape into the Yangtze River along the undercurrent, and by then, no one would be able to catch him.

"I don't know anything about a porpoise! It swam over by itself!"

Sea King shouted, spun around violently, and prepared to dive headfirst into the murky puddle.

His movements were extremely fast, completely exceeding the reaction speed of a normal human.

But he was facing Gu Changan.

Gu Changan didn't even move a step.

"Want to play in the water?"

Gu Changan picked up the walkie-talkie and pressed the talk button.

"Drain it."

Following Gu Changan's command.

The heavy engineering vehicles that had already been positioned on the periphery of the tidal flat let out a deafening roar.

Ten high-power industrial water pumps started simultaneously.

Black water suction pipes, thicker than an adult's thigh, were quickly thrown into the puddle by a dozen Special Police officers.

The roar of the diesel engines drowned out everything else.

The powerful suction created over a dozen huge whirlpools on the surface of the water.

Sea King had just jumped into the water and hadn't had time to activate his Water Escape skill to swim away.

He suddenly felt the surrounding water current become extremely violent.

In less than two minutes.

The water level of this thirty-meter-long and wide puddle dropped rapidly at a speed visible to the naked eye.

The power of the water pumps was astonishing; the murky, muddy water, mixed with various kinds of trash, was frantically sucked away and discharged into a filtration truck in the distance.

Half of Sea King's body was exposed.

He scrambled in the mud with his hands and feet, like a toad thrown onto dry land.

As the water was completely drained.

The Dragon Palace that Sea King relied on to "birth ocean miracles" revealed its truest, ugliest face.

The bottom of the pit was filled with black, foul-smelling silt.

Buried in the silt were large amounts of white plastic bags, discarded tires, old fishing nets, and even a few broken slippers.

And in the middle of this pile of trash emitting the smell of methane.

Everyone saw an unbelievable scene.

Two staff members wearing full sets of professional black diving suits were crouching in the center of the mud pit in an extremely comical posture.

In each of their arms, they were clutching a huge white foam cooler box.

The water around them was gone.

The two looked at each other, still holding the mouthpieces of their oxygen tanks.

The lids of the cooler boxes had long since been flipped over by the water current.

Inside the boxes, dozens of rock-hard frozen hairtail fish and several frozen king crabs, still with supermarket price tags on them, were neatly arranged.

There was even a layer of unmelted frost on the surface of the hairtail fish.

The entire scene was deathly silent.

The lenses of dozens of law enforcement cameras, as well as Sea King's still-operating livestream phone, transmitted this scene clearly to tens of millions of people.

The two people in diving suits crouched awkwardly in the mud, not knowing whether to leave or stay.

One of them stammered, "Brother Sea King... the water... the water is gone. Should I... still hand you this box of frozen hairtail?"