Series details This is the official English synopsis of the story:
The mermaid Irene rescues Cassian, the chaebol heir who was dumped into the deep sea and left for dead by his vengeful enemies. On the brink of death, he grabs her hand feebly and murmurs, "Don't go." Captivated by his plea, Irene leaves the conch shell inherited from her late mother as a keepsake, and trades it with the sea witch for a pair of stunning yet extremely fragile human legs to chase after him on land.
However, Vera, the woman who witnessed the entire rescue scene on the shore, has already stolen the conch and passed herself off as Cassian's savior. Irene willingly stays at Cassian's residence as a lowly servant just to be close to him, only to face relentless persecution from Vera: she is forced to kneel and scrub floors for hours, and ordered to dance barefoot on shards of sharp broken glass. When her mermaid identity is eventually exposed, Cassian, fully manipulated and misled by Vera, smashes her knees with a hammer to dig out the unique scale bones growing under her knee caps, then tosses her out of the mansion like discarded garbage.
Irene drags her mangled legs and crawls 3 full kilometers all the way back to the ocean. Leon, the crown prince of the deep sea, comes for her across the surging waves and brings her back to the undersea royal court. He breaks off his own sacred dragon horn to forge brand new, unbreakable knee joints for her, then launches a devastating full-scale attack that wipes out every branch of Cassian's business empire. It is not until Cassian finally hears that the ancient lullaby sealed in the conch matches Irene's voice perfectly, and spots her name carved on the inner wall of the shell, that the brutal, unvarnished truth shatters his entire world.
He smashes his own knees to experience a fraction of the pain he inflicted on Irene, uses the same hammer to punish Vera for all her lies, then kneels and crawls on the sharp coastal rocks for three whole days begging to see her. The only response he gets from Irene is a cold line: "When you kneel before me, all I feel is disgust."
Vera later leaks Irene's mermaid identity to a notorious gang of mer-hunters. Cassian takes the recovered scale bones and the original conch to sail out to sea, intending to return them to Irene to atone for his sins. After the hunters break his knees, he leaps into the ocean and drags all the hunters down to the abyssal seabed to their deaths. Irene watches him sink under the waves, and shakes her head indifferently. After Cassian's death, all his personal heritage is converted into a permanent marine protection treaty that guards the stretch of ocean Irene lives in for perpetuity. At Irene's coronation ceremony, the last lingering spell song of the conch fully heals her old knee wounds. She walks side by side with Leon towards the glowing golden light deep in the ocean. He once dwelled in the dark, while she now belongs to the endless brightness. The whole story fades away into a silent, vast expanse of dark blue.
English
EnglishEP 40
