novelDeep Sea Treasure
| ← Ch.094 | Ch.096 → |
"If it's not ambergris, then what is it?" Chen Fan was both surprised and doubtful."It looks exactly like the description of ambergris to me!"
"It was in a fish stomach when you picked it up, and many fishes were fighting over it?" The man at the other end of the phone asked instead.
"There were indeed many fishes fighting over it..." Chen Fan finally realized that it was not mentioned that fishes eat ambergris. Otherwise, it would be eaten up by the fishes no matter how much there was in the ocean.
"This is it. The thing you have looks very much like ambergris. Laymen won't be able to tell the difference."
"Then what is it exactly?"
The man was silent for a few seconds before saying, "Where are you from? Can we meet up for a proper discussion?"
"Zhongyun, you?"
"I'm not a Zhongyun local, but I'm currently working in Zhongyun. How about we meet at Yuanshan Teahouse at Yugan Street?"
"Sure, I'll be there in an hour!" Chen Fan decided to meet this mysterious man as he very much wished for the electric eel to be as strong as possible.
"Um, can you bring the item along..."
"I can bring it, but you have to tell me about its origins!" Chen Fan said after thinking for two seconds.
"Alright!"
After hanging up, Chen Fan called Wang Bing on his mobile. Since he went to Myanmar, he had given this guy more than ten days of leave.
"Boss, what is it?"
"Come to the old house in twenty minutes. I'll wait for you at the district entrance!"
"Alright!" Wang Bing replied before hanging up.
After coming home from the internet cafe, Chen Fan wrapped the crystal in a black plastic bag before driving to the district entrance. Twenty minutes later, Wang Bing arrived in a hurry.
"Boss, why did you get me here in such a rush? Are we going for a fight?" Wang Bing said as he ate the pancake in his left hand.
"You take the wheel. I've got something valuable and I'm getting someone's appraisal of it, but I do not know that person well and I'm afraid that he might play tricks."
"Um, um." Wang Bing rubbed both hands on his clothes before slipping into the driver's seat.
They took half an hour before arriving at Yuanshan Teahouse. After observing the surrounding, Chen Fan called the man on his mobile to ask for the exact location before getting Wang Bing to go upstairs.
Chen Fan walked to private room number three and knocked gently at the door. The man who opened the door was in his thirties, dressed neatly in a suit, wore golden-rimmed glasses and had a pineapple head hairstyle. He looked refined and well-mannered, definitely way better than Chen Shuguang.
"Hello, how are you?" The man stretched out his right hand and shook hands with Chen Fan."Let me introduce myself. I'm Wang Xingyu, IT manager of Hong Kong's Bada Biotechnology Group's Zhongyun Branch."
"I'm Chen Fan." Chen Fan also stretched out his hand and did a short self-introduction.
After getting Wang Bing to guard the door, the two went in and Chen Fan started the conversation."Can you tell me the origin of this thing?" Chen Fan opened the plastic bag and pointed at the taupe crystal.
Wang Xingyu did not speak, but touched the crystal emotionally with his hands. Not only that, the guy even placed his nose close to it and sniffed as if he was smoking opium. After a while, looking as if his "drug addiction" had been satisfied, he said, "The source of this thing is actually similar to ambergris. They're both from inside the body of some big creature in the ocean.
The only way to differentiate them from their shape is to see if it's round. The shape of ambergris is irregular, but this thing is as round as a ball."
"Is it also from a type of whale?" Chen Fan pointed at the crystal."Since it is so much like ambergris, I guess it also belongs to a whale."
"Wrong!" Wang Xingyu shook his head from side to side before saying with an unfathomable expression, "This thing has nothing to do with whales. It's from inside the body of a type of giant deep sea jellyfish called'ghost hair jellyfish'!"
"Ghost hair jellyfish? What's that?" Chen Fan was stunned. He had never heard that there was this type of giant jellyfish in the ocean whose name alone was enough to send a chill down one's spine.
"The name of the ghost hair jellyfish came from its tentacles. This type of jellyfish normally lives around two thousand meters underwater, and its umbrella-shaped body can reach over ten meters in diameter. Under its body are numerous hair-like tentacles, making it look like a huge head of long white hair, hence the name ghost hair jellyfish."
Wang Xingyu paused for a while before asking Chen Fan, "Have you heard of the Australian box jellyfish?"
"Yes, it's supposedly the world's most venomous jellyfish. Once a person gets pricked by the poisonous needle on its tentacles, he could die within three minutes." Chen Fan trembled at the thought of this. The electric eel always used high discharge to electrocute any type of jellyfish it met underwater to prevent itself from harm.
"The box jellyfish is indeed very poisonous, but the ghost hair jellyfish's toxicity is not any less as compared to it. Also, the size of the ghost hair jellyfish is many times bigger than it. Someone once discovered a dead jellyfish of this type on the shore, the diameter of its umbrella-shaped body was only five meters but its tentacles were already more than forty meters long."
"Can you go straight to the point, like the origin of this crystal or something?" Chen Fan swallowed his saliva."My concern is the origin of this crystal."
"Sure!" Wang Xingyu dipped his finger with some tea and drew a big round ball on the table before pointing at the center of the ball."If this is the brain of the ghost hair jellyfish, this is where the crystal is from.
A normal jellyfish can live for over thirty days, some up to around a year, but the lifespan of the ghost hair jellyfish is around two years."
"After it's dead, other parts inside its body will decay rapidly, but only the poison sac doesn't. The poison sac, around fifty centimeters in diameter, first floats to the water surface and the poison inside the sac becomes lesser over time, before finally condensing into a ball-shaped crystal."
"What? This thing is actually poison?" Chen Fan pointed at the crystal."But no, something's not right. This thing is not poisonous at all!"
"The toxicity of this thing is like venom, reducing slowly when exposed to air and finally become non-poisonous. The piece you have is probably from a two-year-old ghost hair jellyfish. The longer the ghost hair jellyfish lived, the more transparent and fragrant the crystal it produces, but the size also gets smaller." Wang Xingyu rubbed his hands together, "The stuff produced by sperm whales is called ambergris, and the stuff produced by ghost hair jellyfish also has a name, just that not many people know about it. It's called ghost moon incense!"
"Ghost moon incense? What kinda name is that?" Chen Fan stared with his eyes wide."What's this thing mainly for?" Actually Chen Fan already knew the answer. The electric eel already had a taste of the effect of this thing, and it was simply miraculous!
"This thing is a great nourishment!" Wang Xingyu smacked his lips."Three years ago, our company got a piece similar to yours by chance. After testing, we discovered that there was a large amount of unknown elements in it. We did experiments on different animals; land animals were still fine, but fishes were crazy over this thing. We threw a small bit of it into the water, and they fought over it and turned the whole fish tank red in just a short while. But the strange thing is, this thing has no effect on human beings after being consumed." Wang Xingyu stood up and walked to the door."As for why it is called ghost moon incense..."
Wang Xingyu switched off the light in the room. The shocking thing was, in the dark, this twenty centimeter crystal slowly turned into a luminous pearl, emitting soft, lustrous rays from its surface, making one feel as if he was bathing under the moonlight.
"It has such a feature?" Chen Fan quickly sat up from the chair.
| ← Ch. 094 | Ch. 096 → |