Stockings

Morning arrived.

Sunlight slanted in through the half-open window, casting a long strip of light across the floor. The lines of the soundproofing array had long since dissipated, leaving no trace behind.

This time, Klein woke up before Ophelia. He lay on his side, his right hand resting on her waist, his fingers loosely curled—he wasn't sure if he had placed it there in his sleep or if she had.

Ophelia had her back to him, her breathing steady, her shoulders rising and falling slightly. Her loose golden hair covered half the pillow.

He didn't rush to move, simply lying there for a while.

The morning light filtered through her hair, casting tiny, fragmented spots of light onto the pillowcase.

The skin on the back of her neck looked almost transparent in the sunlight, with faint blue veins visible beneath.

Klein's gaze lingered on that line for a few seconds before shifting away—not out of avoidance, but simply because the sound of the Silver Scale Chamber of Commerce staff moving things downstairs caught his attention. Someone shouted something in the courtyard, pulling his focus.

A few minutes later, Ophelia rolled over. Her eyes opened just a crack, meeting his gaze before closing again.

“What time is it?”

“I don't know, I haven't checked.”

She hummed in response and said nothing more, only opening her eyes again after ten or so seconds.

This time she was fully awake. She sat up with a crisp, efficient motion, her knightly training evident in the way she transitioned from sleep to alertness in an unnaturally short time.

According to their agreement with Nelisa, the day to meet Princess Diancie wasn't until tomorrow.

That meant they had an entire day with nothing to do.

After washing up, Ophelia changed and sat at the desk. She reopened the copy of 《Northland Travelogue》 from the night before, continuing from where she had folded the page.

Klein, however, couldn't sit still.

He flipped through another twenty or so pages of 《Issues of Mana Decay in Mineral Distillation》, becoming increasingly restless.

It wasn't that the writing was poor; he just wanted to perform the experiments himself.

But he had no tools at hand—not even a basic mineral powder grinder. On the table sat only a pot of cold tea and half a bag of chestnuts left over from yesterday.

He closed the book and stood up. Then he sat down. Then he stood up again. He walked to the window to check the sky, walked back to reopen the book, flipped two pages, and closed it again.

“Why don't you go for a walk?” Ophelia finally spoke.

“Will walking help me find experimental equipment?”

“Walking will keep you from pacing in circles in this room.”

Klein looked back at her. She kept her head down, continuing to flip through her book, her tone flat, but the corners of her mouth were tight as she suppressed a smile.

“That was the fourth time you've sat down and stood back up since we started,” she added.

“You were counting?”

“I didn't have to; you've been flickering in my peripheral vision the whole time.”

Klein felt a bit embarrassed. The itch to do research was indeed a chronic ailment for researchers, much like a swordsman who couldn't help but want to touch a fine blade—though Ophelia probably wouldn't agree with that analogy.

“The Silver Scale Chamber of Commerce deals in minerals; surely they must have a crucible somewhere?” he muttered.

“Nelisa arranged for lodging, not a laboratory.”

“True enough.”

He stood by the window for a while, his fingers unconsciously tapping the frame in an irregular, stuttering rhythm.

In the courtyard below, a worker from the chamber was loading several crates onto a carriage, the Silver Scale Chamber of Commerce crest stamped on the sides of the wooden boxes.

On the distant horizon of the royal capital, the silhouettes of several spired buildings stood out clearly in the daylight. Something at the very tip of the tallest tower reflected the light—likely some sort of magic device.

Ophelia finished the page she was reading and placed the book face down on the table. She stood up, walked to the rack, took down her coat, shook it out, and slid an arm into a sleeve.

“What are you doing?” Klein asked.

“Going out with you.”

“Done with the book?”

“I can't focus with you staying in this room.” She finished putting on her coat, her hand pausing as she buttoned it, then she corrected her wording. “The book isn't going anywhere; I can read it after we see the princess tomorrow. If you keep pacing like that, you'll wear a groove into the floor.”

Klein wanted to argue, but realized she was telling the truth.

He said nothing more, turning to grab his own coat.

The two of them tidied up and headed out.

As they passed the front hall, they encountered a manager under Nelisa. His hair was combed impeccably. Upon seeing them, he immediately put on a polite smile and asked where they were headed and if they needed anyone to accompany them.

Klein waved him off, saying they were just going for a stroll.

Once outside the gates of the chamber's headquarters, the streets of the royal capital in the daylight were a different world from what they had seen the previous evening.

Under the sun, all the shops were open. The shouts of vendors and the rumble of wheels mingled together as pedestrians bustled about.

“Where to?” Ophelia asked.

Klein thought for a moment.

“Let's look at some clothes.”

“Clothes?”

“The tailors in the royal capital must use different fabrics and styles than the ones in Silver Scale Harbor. Since we're here, we might as well look.” He paused, then added, “Besides, you only brought two changes of clothes.”

“It's enough.”

“We're meeting the princess tomorrow.”

Ophelia fell silent. Her pace didn't change, but she didn't object either. It was a silent agreement.

Relying on their memory, they walked toward the broad street, finding a ready-made clothes shop they had glimpsed yesterday after turning a couple of corners.

The storefront wasn't particularly large, but the sample garments hanging in the window were sharply tailored, and the materials were clearly expensive.

The shop's name was carved above the lintel in formal lettering.

Pushing the door open, the interior was much more spacious than it looked from the outside.

It was truly a feast for the eyes.

Men's and women's clothing were displayed in separate sections, ranging from everyday home outfits to formal dress for official occasions.

The variety of fabrics was far richer than in Silver Scale Harbor—there was a dark fabric with a subtle pattern that Klein had never seen before. It felt incredibly fine to the touch, as if the smoothness of silk and the sturdiness of cotton had been blended together. He wasn't sure what the material was.

Ophelia stopped at the women's section for a while, flipping over the collar of a coat to check the stitching before setting it back down.

Klein wandered aimlessly through the shop, his gaze scanning the rows of shelves.

Then he stopped.

Tucked away toward the inner side of the shelves hung several sets of items he hadn't expected to see.

Thin and sheer with a soft luster, they ranged in color from pale skin tones to black. Some were short, while the longest stretched from toe to waist.

Stockings.

Not coarse-spun cotton socks, nor knitted wool warmers—these were the kind that were thin enough to see skin through, elastic, and incredibly common in his previous life.

Klein stood rooted to the spot. His first reaction wasn't anything else, but a purely technical question.

Where did these come from?

The chemical engineering knowledge he had learned in his past life wasn't exactly solid, but the basic logic remained.

Stockings—whether nylon or spandex blends—were inextricably tied to the petrochemical system.

Polymerization reactions, spinning processes, elastic fibers... every step was built on the foundation of organic chemistry.

But this world hadn't taken that path at all.

Energy came from mana, metallurgy from alchemy, and even lighting was magic-driven.

The development of petroleum was practically non-existent.

There was no distillation, no cracking, no industrial chain for synthetic polymers.

So, how was this fabric—thin to the point of semi-transparency, elastic, and seemingly resistant to runs—made?

Silk? No, silk didn't have this kind of elasticity.

Glandular secretions from some magic beast? Possible, but the processing precision was absurdly high.

Or had some alchemist figured out a similar synthetic fiber? Using mana to catalyze polymerization?

Klein leaned in a bit closer, wanting to see if the material was labeled.

Just then, he heard footsteps behind him.

“What are you looking at?”

Ophelia walked over and stood beside him.

Before Klein could answer, she had already followed his gaze to the target. Those sheer pairs of stockings hung quietly on the rack, their labels reading “Fine Spider Gauze,” with a high price tag.

Ophelia stared at them for two seconds.

“What are these?” She picked up a skin-toned pair and turned them over, pinching the top with her thumb and forefinger to pull it slightly, revealing its full elasticity. “They look like socks, but I've never seen any this thin.”

“It's my first time seeing them in—’ Klein's words took a sharp turn mid-sentence, “—my first time seeing them too.”

He had almost said “in this world.”

He pulled his focus back to the label.

Fine Spider Gauze—that was an interesting name.

Spider... it was almost certainly related to a spider-type magic beast.

If they used some kind of spider silk as the raw material, the elasticity and toughness would make sense.

Spider silk itself was one of the strongest fibers in nature. Back in his previous life, people had been researching synthetic spider silk for ages, but the cost of mass production could never be brought down.

In this world, they apparently just raised magic beasts to harvest the silk.

Simple and crude, but effective.

He touched the fabric.

It felt smooth and cool, very close to the nylon stockings of his past life, perhaps even better—it lacked that cheap plastic feel, possessing instead the softness of a natural fiber.

“Fine Spider Gauze...” Klein muttered to himself, his fingers still pinching the excessively thin fabric, his thumb rubbing it back and forth. “So it's a product of the silk glands of a spider-type magic beast? Is it spun after being harvested? Or is it drawn directly into form from the gland?”

No one answered him.

Ophelia stood beside him, not engaging with the technical questions swirling in his head.

She had no interest in materials science, but she did look at the items themselves a couple more times.

“Do these things not tear when you put them on?”

She pinched the thinnest part of the stocking and held it up to the light, where the silhouette of her finger was faintly visible.

“Spider silk is very tough,” Klein replied instinctively, his mind still racing.

Ophelia turned the skin-toned stockings over to look at the inner stitching. The stitches were extremely fine and evenly spaced; the craftsmanship was indeed exquisite.

She put them back and picked up a black pair. The color was deep and rich, thin but not entirely transparent.

“Do you want me to try them on?”

Klein's train of thought derailed at that sentence.

He turned to look at her.

Ophelia held the black stockings with a very ordinary expression—the same way she would say, “Should I try this coat on?”

But she wasn't talking about a coat.

Klein's gaze drifted down slightly. Today she was wearing a long dress that ended just below her knees, revealing a section of her calves. Her skin was pale, the lines clean, and her ankles were neatly tapered.

Just that small section was enough to look at.

But the thing was, Klein had seen more.

Not in some scandalous scene—well, okay, there were a few of those.

But more often in daily life.

In the early morning when she sat on the edge of the bed to put on her shoes, he would lie there and see the lines of her entire leg, from her ankle all the way to the top of her thigh, her muscles well-defined but not overly so.

The skin on the inside of her knees and thighs was particularly thin, possessing the kind of whiteness that had never seen the sun.

If she were to put on these black stockings...

The fine gauze would cling to her skin, wrapping that whiteness and tracing the rise and fall of her muscle lines, following the curve of her calf from her toes all the way up, past her knees, to her thighs.

Klein ran that image through his head.

It took less than half a second.

“Yes.”

The answer was crisp and clean, without a hint of hesitation.

Ophelia glanced at him, probably not expecting him to answer so quickly.

She still held the stockings, pausing for a moment.

“I meant after we get back,” she added.

“I know,” Klein said. “You can't exactly try them on in the shop.”

“...Obviously.”

Klein smiled and flipped the label over to check the price.

Twenty-five silver coins a pair. Not cheap, but not outrageous either.

Considering the raw material came from the silk glands of magic beasts, the labor costs for harvesting and processing were bound to be high.

“Should we get two pairs?” he asked.

Ophelia didn't say anything, simply handing him the black pair and picking out a lighter-colored pair for herself—a smoke gray with a faint, ethereal luster.

Klein gave her a second look as he took them.

She had picked two pairs, and in different colors.

Her previous question, “Do you want me to try them on?” had been spoken so plainly, as if she hadn't given it a second thought.

But her actions now betrayed her—if it truly had been a casual remark, she wouldn't have bothered picking out a second pair herself, especially in a different color.

Fine then.

He folded the two pairs and held them, then reached onto the rack and grabbed a skin-toned pair as well. Three pairs. Ophelia raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

When they went to the counter to pay, the clerk was a young woman. She glanced at the items in his hand, then at Ophelia standing behind him, and offered a very professional smile.

“You have good taste, sir. Fine spider gauze is our best-selling style.”

“What kind of magic beast is the material from?” Klein asked.

The clerk clearly hadn't expected a customer to ask that. She blinked before answering, “Crystal rock spiders. There are specialized farms over in Glan Ridge. The silk is harvested from the secondary silk glands in their abdomen. One spider produces about thirty grams of raw silk per season.”

“Thirty grams a season?” Klein frowned. “Then that can't make very many pairs of stockings.”

“That's why they are luxury items,” the clerk said with a smile as she began wrapping the three pairs, layering them carefully in fine paper with practiced motions.

“That will be seventy-five silver coins—”

“Charge it to the Silver Scale Chamber of Commerce.”

The clerk's hand paused, and she looked the two of them over again.

She likely ran through a quick mental check before nodding. “Of course.”

Her attitude became visibly more respectful.

Klein took the wrapped paper bag, thanked the clerk, and pushed the door open.

The sunlight hit his face, and he squinted, carefully tucking the paper bag into his satchel—he placed it quite deliberately at the very top, making sure nothing else would crush it.

Ophelia followed him out, walking beside him, her peripheral vision catching his careful packing.

“Why are you being so careful with that?”

“It's expensive.”

“...Seventy-five silver coins shouldn't be much to you anymore.”

“It's still twenty-five silver coins a pair,” Klein said righteously. “Spider silk fabric, precision weaving, luxury-grade craftsmanship—of course I have to be careful.”

Ophelia didn't respond. But her pace quickened slightly, her face turned away to look at the shops on the other side of the street. Klein didn't need to look to know what she was doing. The red on the tips of her ears hadn't quite faded; she was walking faster to let the wind cool them down.

He didn't call her out on it, matching her pace as they walked side by side through the streets of the royal capital.

The sun was just right, the weather neither too cold nor too hot. A few autumn leaves that hadn't yet fallen from an unknown roadside tree were caught by the wind, slowly spinning as they drifted down to land on Ophelia's shoulder. She reached up to pluck one off, glanced at it, and let it go.

They hadn't even started their actual business, but they had already bought three pairs of stockings.

One couldn't say they were thinking big.

Klein glanced sideways at the person beside him. Her golden hair was almost blinding in the sunlight. She was tilting her head slightly, perhaps looking at the sign of some shop along the street.

The paper bag in his satchel was light; three pairs of stockings didn't weigh much at all.

But his mood was certainly good.