Chapter 3959: Part of Your World (Part 2)

On top of that, the lack of light and the impossibility to speak from a distance had led the merfolk culture to develop special sounds to express their emotions and mark their historical buildings.

A merfolk’s underwater home sang with its inhabitants, and its individual melody would mix with those produced by the neighboring houses in the equivalent of the noise of a bustling city.

When the merfolk had stepped on the Desert’s sands for the first time, they had tried to recreate their native city, Zhen, on the surface. Salaark had gifted them a verdant oasis, and the merfolk were skilled with earth magic, yet the initial results were appalling at best.

Gravity filled any building over one story high with cracks during the construction process, and no amount of effort or stones could keep them from turning into ruins. Even the merfolk who preferred their home to extend horizontally rather than vertically fared no better.

What hundreds of meters underwater sounded like a fine-tuned orchestra, on dry land looked as though a Leviathan with a nasty stomach bug had recently relieved himself multiple times while taking a stroll through the oasis.

The walls of the elongated merfolk houses were jagged and irregular, and the vibrant brown of the fertile soil of the oasis only reinforced the initial impression.

To add insult to the injury, if a merfolk was brave enough to live inside one of those monstrosities, the buildings produced sounds that could only be defined as the forbidden love child of a Harpy’s screech and a Banshee’s scream.

Merfolk had lived for countless generations blind and submerged in water, so they had no notion of aboveground acoustics or color schemes. Giving them paint to decorate their houses was no different from handing gasoline to a pyromaniac.

The result was a disaster that could only be remedied by razing everything to the ground and waiting for nature to heal itself.

Merfolk loved bright colors like pistachio green and electric purple, and had no qualms about using them on different walls of the same house.

The first time Salaark had visited the Starry Lagoon Village, she had convinced herself that one of her retainers had played a cruel prank on her honorable guests. She had offered her apologies to the merfolk tribe and to help clean up such an obscenity.

The baffled expression on the merfolk’s faces had met its match when they had asked the Overlord what she was talking about.

If not for Salaark’s ability to read minds, the Mother of All Phoenixes would have refused to believe her own ears and dug herself into the deepest diplomatic hole of her long career.

After identifying the root cause of the misunderstanding, she had sworn to Mogar that she wouldn’t let such an abomination endure and offered her honored guests a tour of the neighboring cities.

The merfolk were curious by nature, and the idea of exploring a thriving continent like Garlen under Salaark’s protection was too good to turn down. They accepted her offer and were ready to leave, something Salaark couldn’t allow to a bunch of naked people.

Persuading the merfolk to get dressed had been quite a struggle, but that’s a story for another day. The Overlord had brought her guests to visit the villages of her Feathers, then the coastal cities of the Desert, and lastly those of the Empire.

The dull colors, repetitive shapes of the buildings, and the little space between the houses of the same city block had horrified the merfolk. Not one city looked like anything they had dreamed of building on the surface.

Even worse, they were used to spending their lives in the harmonious symphony of the ocean, whereas all they could hear as they moved from one place to another was discordant noise.

Salaark had noticed the merfolk’s disappointment and offered them the assistance of her best engineers. They would help the merfolk to build houses of their liking while also taking care that their shapes complied with the basic standards of decency.

The Overlord offered only a limited selection of paint colors this time, but she made up for it by providing plenty of luscious plants from her gardens. This way, the merfolk got the colorful houses they wanted, and everyone else didn’t feel the need to gouge their eyes out upon entering the village.

Alas, the merfolk had once again taken Salaark’s invitation the wrong way. Most of the merfolk families had chosen a different architectural style for their homes and built them without bothering to reach an agreement with their neighbors.

Salaark walked through the door of the city hall, her delicate features twitching at the sight of the mismatched buildings scattered over a surface too wide to be either pleasant to the eye or at least functional.

She walked double-time, wishing to prolong her stay in the merfolk village for as little as possible. The Overlord chose an empty spot near the shoreline for her performance.

’This way, my Featherlings will have something beautiful to look at when they wake up in the morning and the time to steel their hearts before they turn around.’ She thought as she stared at the clear blue ocean.

A wave of her hand conjured the sand from beyond the borders of the oasis and shaped it into a rectangular two-story building. It was the size of a shack at first, but it slowly expanded in every direction while maintaining its perfect proportions.

Aside from the lack of a sloped roof, it was a scaled-down version of the main building of the Verhen Mansion, with just enough tweaks to resemble the beach house of a Desert noble.

Salaark conjured countless complex spells in the process, shrouding them with her best cloaking runes for the sake of anyone who might be spying on her work. She arranged layer upon layer of magical formations until the house came to life.

The newly enchanted beach house was much bigger on the inside, had a verdant garden on its roof, and was equipped with security measures powerful enough to destroy an Awakened army.

Merfolk and spies alike gaped in awe at Salaark’s masterpiece, failing to see past her ruse. The beautiful building in front of their eyes was Menadion’s tower. The Overlord had just filled a few blanks in the tower core to allow the artefact to shapeshift into its current form.

Everything else was just a cover to hide the tower Warp and justify the powerful enchantments surrounding it.

’Solus needs a geyser to keep her human body, and the merfolk village is built above one.’ Salaark thought. ’This is the perfect solution to hide the tower in plain sight and allow Lith to move away the moment his presence is required somewhere else.’

The Guardian had also connected the Warp Mirror to the Desert’s Gate Network, giving Lith a perfect cover story for those among his guests who were still unaware of the tower’s existence.

Salaark had dropped Solus’ stone ring at the beginning of her performance so that Solus could imprint the geyser, while the sandstorm justified the rapid growth of the building.

Jirni, Orion, Ryla, and Garrik stepped through the mirror camouflaged as a Warp Gate without suspecting they had set foot inside one of the most legendary artifacts in Mogar’s history.

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