This Lake Was Practically Born to Be a Reed

"Liquid capable of creating life…"

Teleporting inside the Hanging Gardens Ruins, Adam spread a pair of wings behind him to halt himself in midair and looked down at the lake below.

In Adam’s eyes, magical radiance rippled across the lake’s surface, filling the entire body of water.

"There really is something special about this lake water… I couldn’t see the forest for the trees."

Meeting the eyes within the lake, Adam raised an eyebrow and lightly tapped the air with a finger. The surging lake water immediately swept up the enormous creature within it and burst into the air.

"This is…"

Slowly opening and closing within the water was a gigantic mollusk dozens of meters tall.

Its shell was white and wave-shaped, while the seemingly fleshy portion in the middle carried a dreamy blue-to-purple gradient… The appearance felt oddly familiar to Adam, as though he had seen it when watching Journey to the West as a child.

Searching through his memories, Adam found its name.

"A Giant Clam? A Giant Clam this huge?"

As the words fell, Adam became even more certain that the lake water possessed an ability similar to creating life.

After fishing out the oarfish last time, Adam had carefully inspected the lake and found no Giant Clams at all.

And although he was no biology expert, he had at least seen popular science programs and encyclopedia entries on many animals. As he remembered, once Giant Clams passed their juvenile stage, they used their byssal threads to anchor themselves to the seabed and could never move through the ocean again.

That also ruled out the possibility that this Giant Clam had "swum" into the lake through some underwater passage.

That left only one possibility—this Giant Clam had appeared in the lake within the past few years and grown this large!

"Interesting. Truly interesting. Ancient wizards already possessed magical technology like this?"

Shrinking the water sphere in the air and holding it in his hand, Adam looked down at the lake with shining eyes, while also turning his attention toward the shore.

Though he could not yet understand how this lake water created life, he planned to keep watch over it before using time magic to rewind the past here by a certain period.

It sounded complicated and troublesome, but Adam felt the process should go smoothly. Based on what he already knew, this lake water did not need very long to create living creatures.

The information he had gathered last time surfaced in Adam’s mind.

He had not paid much attention to it before because he had been in a hurry to save Eugene’s parents. Then he had simply put it out of his mind, only beginning to focus on it again now.

According to the intelligence from those… uh… two dim-witted wizards he had met by the lake last time, they had first entered the cave and encountered the Kraken a few months before Adam arrived.

But Adam had only encountered an oarfish and had found no Kraken in the lake. At the same time, oarfish were not freshwater creatures, nor were they even shallow-water creatures. That was why he had concluded that some place at the bottom of the lake connected to the ocean, and that the oarfish and Kraken were outsiders.

But now it seemed that both the oarfish and the Kraken had been native inhabitants of the lake. Over the past few months, the Kraken had turned back into lake water, and the lake water had then gestated an oarfish?

"So that oarfish will turn into water after a while? That can’t be right. I’ve eaten it so many times, and Eugene even took some home to freeze and eat slowly. If it turned into water, he definitely would have told me."

Adam rubbed his chin.

"So does it turn into water after being alive for a while? Or… does it have to remain in this lake water for a certain period before turning into water?"

With that thought, Adam glanced at the Giant Clam water sphere in his hand. In the blink of an eye, one water sphere became two, then two became four. One was frozen into a block of ice, the water in another was replaced with ordinary seawater, and the remaining two stayed unchanged.

Although Giant Clams had been first-class protected animals in China in his previous life, making their capture highly illegal, Adam also remembered that their flesh was said to be delicious… It would be far too wasteful for it to simply turn into water.

Lost in thought, Adam descended to the lakeshore.

"Hmm, before rewinding time, I might as well taste this legendary Giant Clam and see what it tastes like. Hopefully, such a huge size hasn’t made the meat too tough… After all, by my calculations, it should still be less than a year old."

Taking a set of cooking utensils from his pocket and enlarging them, Adam restored one of the two unchanged Giant Clam water spheres to its original size, then fell into thought.

"How should a Giant Clam be eaten… I’ve never had one. It should be similar to other shellfish, right?"

In an instant, countless methods for cooking clams, razor clams, freshwater mussels, scallops, mussels, blood clams, oysters, and other shellfish flashed through Adam’s mind.

"Forget it. When in doubt, use garlic. I’ll grill one first and see how the texture is."

With a wave of his hand, he tossed the lake water surrounding the Giant Clam back into the lake. Adam’s eyes flashed.

"Hmm?"

Magic smoothed the waves across the lake’s surface, yet even after the water calmed, it continued spreading toward the shore.

And in Adam’s memory, the lake water had originally been level with the shore. This could only mean one thing—the lake’s waterline had now risen above its original height!

"After I removed part of the lake water just now, the water in the lake is increasing again?"

Thinking carefully, he had also frozen and taken away quite a bit of lake water along with the oarfish last time. Yet when he had looked at the lake just now, the water had still been level with the shore.

Adam had not cared much before. So much time had passed, after all, and changes in the lake water were normal. But now, this lake had risen by so much in just a few minutes right before his eyes…

There were only so many sources for a lake’s water: from the sky through precipitation, from the ground through surface runoff, or from underground through groundwater.

The first two could be ruled out, leaving only one possibility…

Adam lowered his eyes and looked toward the now-calm, bottomless lake water.

"Should I rewind the past first, or go down to the lakebed and investigate the source of this water first… Ah! Look at me, I almost forgot the important matter because of this."

Adam slapped his forehead.

"Of course I should turn this big fellow into garlic first… How much seasoning and minced garlic will this take?"

He shook his head in mild distress, but the corners of Adam’s mouth could not help rising. With such a huge garlic clam, he could even extravagantly leave out the vermicelli… Uh, forget it, he was craving garlic vermicelli noodles too. He would make some extra.

Having most likely discovered a field that grew its own seafood—and one that randomly produced all kinds of gigantic seafood—undoubtedly delighted Adam far more than merely finding an oarfish last time.

He liked seafood, and he liked the surprise of never knowing what kind of seafood he would harvest next. He liked even more the amount that could last him several meals.

Heavens, this lake was practically born to be a Reed!

As smoke from grilling food slowly rose before Adam, a thick, squat giant tree suddenly burst from the ground beside his feet in the next instant. It was less than a hundred meters tall, yet its diameter was so vast that nearly a hundred people would be needed to encircle it.

The tree’s interior was naturally hollow, forming separate spaces that people could live in. At the same time, flowers emitting faint light bloomed both inside and outside the tree.

For the next while, Adam planned to live here for a few days and carry forward Hufflepuff’s fine traditions by properly researching the diversity of marine life.

Slurp~ (ˉ﹃ˉ)