Mutation

Several months later, the west coast of the Empire.

The sea breeze rushed in from the harbor, carrying a salty, fishy scent and making the roadside signs creak and groan.

There were fewer fishing boats at the docks than the last time they visited, but far more people—the flags of the Silver Scale Chamber of Commerce hung from several warehouses along the coast, their blue backgrounds and silver patterns snapping sharply in the wind.

Klein stood by the carriage and stretched his back.

After three days of riding in a carriage, his waist felt like it no longer belonged to him.

Ophelia descended from the other side, her movements crisp and efficient as her boots crunched against the gravel. She scanned her surroundings and pushed back the hood of her cloak, revealing a few strands of blonde hair tossed by the sea breeze.

“We’re back,” she said, her tone carrying no particular sentiment, just a simple statement of fact.

Klein brushed the dust from his hem and walked toward her, reaching out to straighten a crooked button on her cloak’s collar. It was a casual gesture, finished in a moment, as natural as if he were tidying her clothes at home.

Ophelia didn’t dodge or offer thanks. She simply tilted her head slightly to make it easier for him to reach.

The sea breeze surged from the harbor, bringing salt, moisture, and a faint, inexplicable sweetness that didn't belong to normal seawater.

Ophelia’s nostrils flared slightly. She didn't speak, but her left hand instinctively withdrew into the folds of her cloak.

Klein noticed the movement. His gaze lingered on her hand for a heartbeat before shifting away to look at the gray, hazy horizon.

That horizon looked no different than it had months ago.

But they both knew that the things beneath the surface were no longer the same.

The trouble had started a month ago.

...

After returning to the manor from the imperial capital, Klein pushed aside all other matters and locked himself in the laboratory.

The “Siren.”

That thing the Sage had sealed inside the cube.

The first two weeks had gone smoothly. Klein peeled back the layers of information on the Siren’s surface like opening a box nested within countless others—every time he opened one, there was another, and another, the structure precise to the point of obsession. Every day after finishing his notes, he would explain his findings to Ophelia. Most of the time, she didn't quite grasp the technical details, but she would ask one or two incredibly sharp questions—so sharp that Klein sometimes had to stop and think before he could answer.

The issue arose in the third week.

That afternoon, Klein performed a deep analysis of the Siren on the informational level. He used his own modified analysis array—a tool he had polished for a long time, with a precision several magnitudes higher than the standard ones used by the Empire. Ophelia sat nearby, her left hand resting on her knee, quietly watching him work. She had long grown accustomed to keeping him company in the laboratory, never disturbing him, occasionally handing him tools.

Three hours into the analysis, the first thing Klein noticed wasn't a change in the cube—it was the air.

The air in the laboratory suddenly became heavy, so heavy that every breath felt like an invisible weight pressing on his chest. The moment he looked up, the readings on the array disk spiked violently.

The information density inside the cube was skyrocketing.

It wasn't a gradual increase; it was a deluge, like a dam that had just cracked wide open.

Ophelia was the first to make a sound.

It wasn't a word, but a short, muffled grunt pressed from her throat—her left hand jerked violently, and her entire body tensed as if something were pushing outward from inside her arm. The black patterns on the back of her hand expanded to her fingertips in an instant. They were no longer the dark marks that lay quietly beneath the skin, but were surging upward in waves, as if they were alive. Fine scales sprouted from between her fingers, shimmering with a faint, moist luster—as if something had awakened them from within.

“Klein.”

Her voice was steady. But Klein heard what was buried in that name—not fear, but pain.

“I see it.”

He was already adjusting the array. His fingers moved across the array disk with lightning speed, dialing the output power down by thirty percent—his movements were incredibly fast, but not frantic; they were precise and calculated. In those few seconds, his brain processed at least three things simultaneously: the array's power curve, the structural changes in the cube's information, and the extent of the mutation in Ophelia's left hand.

But it was too late.

The sealing runes on the surface of the cube began to dim one by one. They weren't being destroyed—the lines didn't shatter or dissipate—they were being overwritten from within. New runes grew from beneath the old ones, like vines covering a stone wall, slowly swallowing the Sage's seal.

Several sheets of parchment were blown off the desk by an invisible force. The glassware in the corner of the laboratory began to vibrate faintly; a measuring cup slid off the edge of a shelf and shattered on the floor, but in that moment, no one had the mind to care.

The pressure in the air continued to rise. Klein felt his eardrums buzzing, and the readings on the array disk had completely exceeded the preset safety thresholds, the numbers jumping so fast he could barely read them—

Then, suddenly, everything stopped.

It wasn't the kind of stop that comes from being blocked—it was the kind that comes from being hollowed out.

The cube fell silent. Its surface luster faded, and the sealing runes vanished entirely, leaving behind a dull, unmarked, translucent block, like a piece of amber that had its essence sucked dry.

The Siren hadn't broken the seal.

She had collapsed.

When Klein thought back on the process later, he used an imprecise but intuitive metaphor: it was like opening a compressed file, but instead of data, the file contained something alive.

The various biological information contained within the Siren had been decompressed at that moment—no, “decompressed” was too mild a word. It was a deluge. All the compressed and folded information streams were released simultaneously, spreading outward through the channels of the information layer, finding the most suitable material carriers to manifest into reality.

That “most suitable material carrier” was the waters of the west coast.

The entire process, from start to finish, took no more than twenty seconds.

Immediately after the collapse, Klein severed all array connections and stored the remaining cube. The first thing he did wasn't to check the array disk or analyze the data—he turned, walked over to Ophelia, and knelt before her, taking her left hand to inspect it.

Ophelia didn't pull away. Her fingertips were still trembling slightly, and the scales were slowly smoothing back down, like a tide receding from a beach. The black patterns retracted from her fingertips, pulling back to her hand and then her wrist. But they moved slower than before.

Klein held her wrist, his thumb pressing against her pulse, feeling her heartbeat.

“Does it hurt?”

“I’m fine.”

“Liar.”

“...It doesn't hurt much.”

She gently pulled her hand back, flexing her fingers to ensure each one could move normally. Then she looked up at him, her golden eyes calm.

“Don't worry about me yet. Look at that thing.”

Klein didn't get up immediately. He looked at her for another two seconds, as if trying to gauge how much truth was in her “it doesn't hurt much.” Only then did he stand and return to the workbench.

He spent a full two hours confirming that the mutation in Ophelia's left hand hadn't worsened—during those two hours, he ran the detection array three times, compared all historical data, and verified every single indicator twice. Ophelia told him to go eat something at one point; he said “just a moment,” and that moment lasted forty minutes.

Only after all that did he sit down.

The laboratory was very quiet. Scattered parchment covered the floor, the broken measuring cup still lay in the corner, and the glass shards sparkled in the candlelight. The sense of pressure in the air had completely dissipated, leaving only the scent of candles and old wood.

Klein stared at the mess on the desk for a long time.

His expression was rare. It wasn't frustration or anxiety—it was more like a cold, directionless silence. It was as if a machine that had always been running in his mind hadn't stopped, but all its gears had simultaneously turned toward the same problem and jammed there, unmoving.

Finally, he spoke.

“I messed up.”

His voice wasn't heavy.

It was a statement, yet it carried a hint of a question.

Ophelia sat across from him, slowly wiping her left hand with a clean cloth. The black patterns had receded below her wrist and the scales were flat again, but her fingertips were still trembling slightly.

She didn't comfort him. She didn't say things like “it's not your fault.”

She understood him. When he said “I messed up,” he wasn't blaming himself; he was making a judgment. He didn't need comfort; he needed information.

“How badly did you mess up, exactly?” she asked.

“The west coast might end up with some... things that shouldn't be there.”

Ophelia’s hand paused as she wiped it.

“What things?”

“It’s hard to say for sure.” Klein rubbed the bridge of his nose. His fingers still had a faint, unnoticeable stiffness—he had been operating the array disk for too long, and his joints hadn't fully relaxed yet. “The Siren herself is a type of conceptual manifestation of the will of the deep sea; the biological information she contains is incredibly diverse. Once decompressed, these things will appear as populations—what kind, how large, and where, I can't determine right now.”

He looked up at her, and for once, he wasn't smiling.

It wasn't a look of gravity—Klein was rarely grave—it was more of a clean, focused seriousness that appeared after all his usual expressions had been stripped away.

“We have to go.”

Ophelia set down the cloth and pulled her left sleeve down, hiding the black marks. The movement was practiced and natural, like tying a shoelace.

“Then let’s go.”

...

The messages were sent out through two channels.

First, they used the communicator to contact Nelisa, asking her to mobilize her people to investigate any anomalies along the west coast. Separately, they wrote a letter to Diancie and sent it via the official post stations, carefully weighing the wording—they couldn't make it sound so dire that the Princess would immediately ride out from the imperial capital, but they couldn't downplay it so much that she would let her guard down.

The message to Nelisa had barely been sent when her reply came back.

It was startlingly fast.

It wasn't the kind of “got it, I’ll check” fast, but the “I already have something” fast. The Silver Scale Chamber of Commerce’s intelligence network on the west coast was much denser than Klein had estimated—or perhaps, Nelisa had never taken her eyes off those waters to begin with.

After reading the reply, Klein handed the communicator to Ophelia.

The reply was short, only three lines.

Line one: Five fishing villages along the coast have reported sightings of anomalous marine life.

Line two: Schools of never-before-seen fish have appeared in the waters outside Silver Scale Harbor; thirty percent of the creatures hauled in by fishing nets are not on any known species registry.

Line three: Related waters have been cordoned off. Waiting for you.

Ophelia finished reading and set the communicator back on the table, falling silent for two seconds.

It had only been a few hours.

Nelisa’s response was as if she had been sitting on accumulated data for a long time. It was truly... impressive.

“She reacted faster than I expected.”

“She’s been watching the west coast all along.” Klein leaned back in his chair, his fingers idly tapping the table. “The Silver Scale Chamber of Commerce’s presence on the coast isn't a recent development. She arrived in these waters before us, and she knows better than we do what lies beneath them.”

He paused, then added: “She is not a simple woman.”

Ophelia didn't comment. She simply pushed the communicator to the corner of the desk and stood up to pack the luggage they had scattered the day before. She already knew what to bring and what to leave behind.

Diancie’s reply reached them while they were on the road.

The envelope bore the Princess's private seal, the wax slightly crooked. Upon opening it, the handwriting inside was somewhat hurried, the ends of the strokes trailing off in jagged lines, clearly written in haste.

The gist was: My father already knows and will dispatch a team from the Privy Council to assist. I am coming as well—don't try to stop me, I’ve already left.

The vertical stroke of the final character was pulled long, as if she had tossed the pen aside and run out the door the moment she finished writing.

Klein read the letter and handed it to Ophelia.

Ophelia scanned the final “don't try to stop me,” her lip twitching slightly, whether in helplessness or something else.

“She certainly moves fast.”

“Faster than the post.” Klein folded the letter and put it away. “I suspect she left the very day she received our letter, and the reply was actually written afterward—she probably rode out the city gates and then thought, ‘Ah, I forgot to reply,’ and sent someone back to write it.”

“...That’s possible.” Ophelia paused. “Very possible.”

...

The carriage jolted along the coastal post road for three days.

The road conditions were the same as when they had first come to the west coast.

After all, not that much time had actually passed; how could there be a significant change?

They traveled by day and rested at post stations by night. Inside the carriage, Klein flipped through his notes from the past month twice, performing a full review of all data before and after the Siren’s collapse.

On the surface, the Siren’s collapse looked like an operational error on his part, but in reality—he had run the simulations countless times—there was nothing wrong with the array itself, and the information analysis process was within safe limits. Every step he took was below the preset thresholds; the power curve showed no abnormal peaks, and the frequency of data collection followed standard protocols.

If the same array and the same process were applied to any known alchemical specimen, this result would have been impossible.

The true cause lay with the Siren herself: the information structure within her was not passively stored, but had a spontaneous tendency to decompress. It was like a seed that doesn't need help to sprout—it was simply waiting for the right moment.

And Klein’s deep analysis had happened to provide that moment.

Or—a more unsettling thought occurred to him on the second evening—was this creature itself a convergence of composite information, and when he tried to distinguish that information through observation, did it collapse into separate individuals?

Observation leads to collapse.

It wasn't that he broke the seal, but that his very act of analysis triggered the transition of information from a state of superposition to a definite state?

If that were the case...

Then when the Sage handed this thing to him, did she know this step would happen?

Klein closed his notes and leaned against the carriage wall, watching the coastline flash by outside the window. The sky had already darkened, leaving only a layer of gray-blue twilight on the sea, the distant coastline looking like a blurred ink stain.

He thought for a long time.

A soft sound of breathing came from beside him. Ophelia was leaning against the opposite wall of the carriage, half her body covered by her cloak, eyes closed. It was unclear if she was asleep or deep in thought. Her left hand rested on her knee, covered by her sleeve, the black patterns on the back of her hand hidden—but Klein knew they were there.

The sea breeze squeezed through the cracks in the carriage window, carrying the smell of salt and stirring the blonde hair at her temples.

The things that shouldn't be on the west coast had already appeared. Regardless of whether the Sage knew or had arranged it, what needed to be handled would be handled, and what needed to be cleaned up would be cleaned up.

He tucked his notes into his bag and reached out to tighten the carriage window on Ophelia’s side.