Rhine's words were calm, yet they carried a confidence that inspired unconditional trust.
"Why? Rhine said I'd be fine? Why did he say it so quietly?" Ariel couldn't understand Rhine's words, but she chose to believe him.
"Teacher!" An anxious Aurora looked at Rhine, "I'm at a loss now. Please help me!"
Rhine calmly said,
"When I was trying to successfully concoct a medicinal wine that could turn human legs into a fish tail, I suddenly received a revelation of fate—fate is so unpredictable, occasionally giving random hints…"
…
In the Mirror World, inside the replicated temple.
Joyful music filled the air, and behind the bride and groom, many oil lamps emitted a warm light, like scattered stars in the night.
Everyone looked at the Prince and Princess on the altar, sincerely wishing them well.
—Today's wedding was too rushed, and many who should have witnessed the Prince and Princess's marriage did not have time to arrive. The people at the wedding mainly consisted of musicians, temple priests responsible for presiding over the ceremony, and some noble guests dragged in by the Old Witch to fill the numbers.
"Next, let the bride and groom drink the celebratory wine," the priest announced.
Eric was still dazed, not yet recovered from the mental shock of losing his memories, and was acting almost instinctively. He poured the brown wine into a glass and drank it all.
"Wait a moment, Eric." The Ender Princess suddenly noticed a problem and kindly reminded him, "You seem to have taken the wrong wine."
"Taken the wrong…" The bewildered Prince Eric murmured the words.
He looked at the empty wine bottle on the table.
That bottle, which had originally contained brown medicinal wine, was now completely empty.
Prince Eric didn't remember who gave him the wine, but as soon as he saw the bottle, he felt an inexplicable warmth and familiarity.
"If something happens to me, I should drink this wine…" Prince Eric instinctively thought. It was this instinctive intuition that made him drink the medicinal wine.
Suddenly, Prince Eric couldn't stand steady and stumbled to the ground.
"Ah!"
"Help!"
"What happened to Prince Eric?"
Alarmed shouts rang out among the crowd.
Even the priest responsible for reciting blessings turned pale with fright.
Noticing everyone looking at her with surprise, the Ender Princess also shrieked in alarm, her face filled with terror. Prince Eric first froze, then lowered his head to look at his lower body.
His legs had disappeared at some point, and his lower body had turned into a fish tail!
He looked exactly like the Mermaid of legend.
"Monster, a monster!"
"A Mermaid? Why did Prince Eric turn into a Mermaid?"
"Oh my goodness, what happened?"
The musicians stopped playing, the groomsmen and bridesmaids hid in corners, and everyone looked at Prince Eric, who had turned into a monster, with fear.
Only the Ender Princess remained standing, her gaze still gentle as ever, though filled with horror:
"Eric, what's wrong with you? You… must be hiding some secret, aren't you?"
Prince Eric trembled, gripping his fish tail with both hands, feeling the smoothness of the scales and the sensation of his hands touching the tail—this confirmed to him that it was his own tail.
He stared straight at the beautiful fish tail, completely lost in thought.
It wasn't until his vision blurred and the world seemed to be covered in a hazy mist that Prince Eric realized: his eyes had inexplicably filled with tears.
He remembered!
He remembered everything!
In the past, people on land must have looked at that girl and her kind in the same way, right?
Prince Eric remembered another girl with the same fish tail, and he recalled the scene he had once seen in the crystal ball—that girl swimming past broken bed boards and masts, completely disregarding the risk of being hit herself, saving him in the raging waves; he remembered the determination with which that girl swam into the coral forest to ask the Sea Witch for a magic potion; he remembered walking through the palace corridor with the girl's hand in his, every passerby praising that they had never seen such a graceful posture, because those legs were transformed from this very fish tail.
All the forgotten memories resurfaced.
Because those memories were not traces on the beach, destined to vanish after a single tide, but rather the bitterness and joy carved into hard rock, which could only be covered, but never erased!
"Ariel, my Ariel!"
Prince Eric shrieked.
"Where is Ariel? Where am I? Why am I here?"
He was both bewildered and terrified, looking left and right.
The confused memories of the past hour rushed in—mainly this hasty and absurd wedding, which felt like a nightmare.
Hearing Prince Eric call out a stranger's name, and recalling the Prince's strange behavior and inconsistent words earlier, the Ender Princess vaguely guessed something, and her eyes welled up slightly.
"I remember, I understand everything now," Prince Eric shouted. "I was cursed, someone made me forget my beloved, all to make me participate in this wedding!"
Prince Eric wriggled his unfamiliar and difficult-to-control fish tail, moving a few steps across the floor towards the Ender Princess.
He said to the Ender Princess, half-mockingly, half-sincerely:
"I'm sorry. As I said before, the one I love is another girl, another girl who saved me. She is a Mermaid."
"For me, she drank the potion that split her fish tail into legs, abandoned her familiar homeland, and met me on land."
"To be with her, we found a great magician and asked him to concoct a medicinal wine that would allow us to both turn into Mermaids and go to the sea together."
The Ender Princess was stunned.
The immense amount of information contained in Prince Eric's brief statement left her almost unable to react.
It sounded like a story from a fairy tale book.
Even more bizarre and strange than those stories!
The Ender Princess murmured,
"So that's it, that Old Witch added a mind-altering drug to the wine."
She immediately rushed to the Prince, who had already turned into a Mermaid, steadied Eric's unsteady body, and stared at the Prince's dark eyes with deep remorse:
"I'm sorry, Eric, I truly didn't know, that's why I let you drink that bewitching medicine!"
"So that's it, this is a deception, a huge deception," Prince Eric clenched his fists. "They'd rather alter my memories than let us marry. There must be some conspiracy hidden in this!"
He tried to stand up, but having lost his legs, he could no longer do this simple thing.
And then Eric thought:
When Ariel first wanted to come to land, she might have encountered the same situation. Therefore, after Ariel pushed him, unconscious like a dead body, onto the shore, the Mermaid could only watch him from afar in the seawater. Land and sea were an insurmountable chasm separating humans and Mermaids.
The Ender Princess covered her mouth, her eyes complex, wondering what she was thinking.
"No, I can't stay here. We must leave this place and end this absurd wedding farce!" Prince Eric used his hands to pull himself across the ground, moving towards the temple's main door.
At the same time, everyone else in the temple was already in a panic, completely oblivious to Eric's story.
Someone tried to open the temple door to escape, but found it tightly welded shut.
"It's too strange, the door won't open!"
"We're all trapped in here!"