I Can Fish Up Everything!

Sometimes, it takes less than ten minutes to shatter a superstition.

Wang Junhe stared, slightly vexed, at a small silver pomfret in the container beside him. Ten minutes had passed, and he’d finally caught a fish.

This seemed to prove that changing rods had helped, but...

Then he glanced at the pomfret in Gu Nan’s livewell—there were already over a dozen. It seemed changing rods hadn’t affected Gu Nan’s fishing speed at all.

What was even more infuriating was that Guo Xiao, next to him, had now successfully caught two fish—one more than him.

Gu Nan tossed the pomfret he’d just caught into his livewell, then chuckled. "Looks like this rod is my personal good luck charm. Want to trade back?"

"Uh... I can give the rod back, but how about you let me shake your hand so some of your luck rubs off on me?" Wang Junhe didn’t try to hog the rod. He reeled in his line and handed it over, but this time, he set his sights on Gu Nan himself.

"..." Gu Nan looked rather helpless. "Is it possible the bite is just a little better over here? Why don’t you guys try switching spots?"

Wang Junhe’s and Guo Xiao’s eyes lit up at the same time. That made sense!

So they quickly swapped spots, one on Gu Nan’s left and the other on his right, about a meter apart, effectively sandwiching him between them.

As the old saying goes, listen to good advice and you’ll eat your fill.

After they changed spots, even though they had to start chumming all over again, it wasn’t long before each of them hooked a fish.

They applied the "brute force works wonders" principle, simply hoisting the small, hooked pomfret right out of the water.

"Looks like it really was the spot!" Wang Junhe said with satisfaction as he unhooked the fish and tossed the pomfret into his container.

Fishing was like that sometimes. A few meters could make a world of difference. Pick the wrong spot, and you’d spend the whole day just feeding the fish.

Wang Junhe was already thinking about how he’d cook the pomfret for his daughter.

The pomfret was popularly hailed as the number one fish, as reflected in the saying, "First pomfret, second threadfin, third and fourth, the Spanish mackerel." It was a well-known proverb in the southern regions.

A fresh silver pomfret, once Steamed, was a delicacy. The strip of meat along its back was especially prized; with a gentle scrape of a spoon, the entire piece would lift away cleanly.

Boneless and tender, it was perfect for children.

For the next while, they all had a blast, catching one fish after another.

But a closer look revealed that the number of fish in Gu Nan’s livewell was still increasing the fastest. It was clear that since binding with the game, his fishing luck had genuinely improved.

Before, he had actually been just like Wang Junhe and Guo Xiao—a "feeder" for the ocean’s fish farm most of the time.

The school of silver pomfret seemed content to rest and linger among the reefs by the isolated island, showing no signs of leaving.

More and more fishing skiffs and boats were arriving, their occupants clearly having called over friends to join in.

The extra boats didn’t affect Gu Nan and his friends’ fishing, however. Their catch rate remained largely unchanged; they were still landing a fish every minute or two.

If the fish weren’t so small, Gu Nan’s livewell would probably be full by now. Instead, even with seventy or eighty of them, they only took up half the space—and that was including the crushed ice.

As time went on, the school of silver pomfret also attracted some of the big fellas that lived in the island’s reefs.

A large Red Friend Fish, weighing more than a dozen pounds, slowly swam up from the depths. Having rested all night, it was famished, and this sudden feast was far more appetizing than the food tossed by humans.

Reaching the edge of the school, it suddenly accelerated. The silver pomfret reacted instantly, scattering in all directions, like the surface of a rubber ball suddenly caving in.

But while the pomfrets that saw the large Red Friend Fish dodged, those inside the school, following their companions with their vision blocked, didn’t react in time.

A small silver pomfret was instantly caught in the Red Friend Fish’s massive jaws, its body bent grotesquely in half.

The Red Friend Fish turned, holding the pomfret in its mouth. After a few slow chomps, it swallowed the smaller fish whole.

But one small pomfret wasn’t nearly enough. It had to keep hunting.

It wasn’t just the Red Friend Fish; some large groupers from the reef also emerged.

The smaller, faster ones gave direct chase to the school.

The larger ones simply waited for stray pomfrets to flee toward the bottom, gobbling them up in a single gulp as they came near.

This school of pomfret was a feast for the anglers, and it was a feast for these behemoths as well.

Of course, compared to the pomfrets’ swimming speed, the big fish still had a very high failure rate when trying to hunt them.

Take the large Red Friend Fish, for instance. It had only succeeded on its first try. Once the pomfrets were on alert, it failed to catch anything on its next several attempts.

This left it a bit discouraged. Just then, some anglers started chumming again, so it changed its target, deciding to go for an easier meal.

Just then, on the fishing boat closest to Gu Nan, an angler suddenly shouted in excitement, "Holy shit! A big one! It’s huge!"

The commotion immediately drew the attention of all the nearby anglers.

"That kid’s lucky. How’d he hook a big one with that setup?" Wang Junhe said, his voice laced with envy.

Guo Xiao, however, shook his head. "’Catch a big fish on a pomfret rig? Just watch, the line’s gonna snap. That fish is getting away for sure.’"

Sure enough, the next moment, the angler’s rod, which had been bent into an arc, suddenly snapped straight. The taut line went slack. The fish really had gotten away.

The angler sighed in frustration, muttering about a fifty-pounder. "A fifty-pounder got away..."

But the savvier anglers had already silently reeled in their lines. They began swapping out their lines and hooks, and tossing out chum as if it were free.

’Who’s going to fish for small fry when there are monsters in the water!’

Gu Nan and his friends were no different, quickly swapping to heavier lines and larger hooks.

He didn’t need to change his main line, however—just the leader and the bait. As a result, he was much faster than the other two.

He cast his bait into the water, and then Gu Nan also tossed in a large amount of squid chunks—almost everything he had cut up with scissors that morning.

"Damn, Ah Nan, you’re fast! You don’t need to change your main line?"

"It’s fine. The quality of my main line is great. It can handle a fifty-pounder, no problem."

"Huh, it looks pretty thin. Where’d you buy it?"

"It’s out of production now. What’s on my reel is all I have. You know how it is—the better they make something, the faster the company goes out of business. That tackle factory went under a couple of years ago. This setup was actually something a friend bought for his collection and later gave to me."

’Gu Nan could buy more line, but the blue-grade line cost three thousand Gold Coins. There was no way he was going to give that away as a favor!’

’Something this high-tech was best kept for himself.’

Hearing this, Wang Junhe and Guo Xiao didn’t press the matter, nor did they feel particularly disappointed.

Their own gear was excellent, and on the surface, it didn’t look any worse than Gu Nan’s. They had only asked out of a collector’s impulse.

The crowd of anglers all shifted their focus to catching big fish, and two of them actually got lucky and hooked into something huge.

Meanwhile, a large, brown fish was slowly swimming toward the surface.

It had been lurking near the bottom, waiting for an easy meal of small fish or crabs to come to it.

But then, someone had been incredibly generous, tossing a huge amount of food into the water.

It was familiar with this routine. Every day, all sorts of mysterious food would appear, and all it had to do was swim around to get a bite.

The only reason it had grown so big and fat was because of these kind people!