Klein closed the hard-covered notebook and tossed it aside.
The movement beneath the water was drawing closer.
Ophelia’s left hand remained in its sensing posture, the black patterns on her wrist pulsing with increasing frequency. She didn't speak, but she tilted her head slightly, gesturing toward the stern with her eyes.
Klein ignored the shadows crawling over the reefs. He raised his hand with a backhanded flick.
Mana manipulation.
A blue-backed fish burst from the water, suspended in mid-air. Its tail fin beat frantically against the air, splashing droplets of water; two landed on Ophelia’s cloak, but she didn't bother to wipe them away.
Klein stared at the fish.
The remnants of his dream hadn't quite faded. That all-consuming celestial body—he wasn't even sure if it was a dream or some sort of intuitive deduction—had given him a wild hypothesis.
If matter was compressed to the absolute extreme, stripping away all physical shells, would the underlying code be exposed?
The core of alchemy was deconstruction and reconstruction. Extracting metal from ore or essences from plants were all acts of separation on different levels. But at the lowest level of those operations, it was still a contest between matter and matter.
What he wanted to do now went beyond that scope.
He raised his right hand, fingers curling into a loose grip.
Gravity magic.
Ophelia recognized this opening stance. The last time he had used this technique, it was merely to deal with a few of Karl Vincent’s soldiers.
A short-range, directional gravitational pressure could force a fully armed cavalryman and his horse to their knees.
But the way he closed his hand this time was different. The mana wasn't being poured downward; it was converging toward a central point.
Klein changed the structure of the mana output. Gravity was no longer pressing down; it was collapsing inward, centered on the fish’s body.
He wanted to simulate that boundary-erasing collapse.
The invisible pressure suddenly tightened.
The suspended blue-backed fish jerked and went stiff, all its struggling ceased.
Its scales began to cave inward, and its fine bones let out a sharp, cringe-inducing crackle under the silent pressure.
An eyeball suddenly bulged out, its translucent lens distorting under the high pressure until it was forced out of the socket, dangling at the edge of the body.
Klein’s gaze was locked onto this mass of flesh being destroyed.
His knuckles tightened inch by inch—not from physical exertion, but as a fine-tuning of the mana output. He was looking for a point, a theoretical gap where the physical structure completely failed and the information level began to loosen.
That gap had to exist.
Just a little more pressure.
The fish’s outline had completely vanished, turned into a lump of meat being forcibly kneaded. Scales sank deep into muscle, and bone spurs pierced through the skin until they were indistinguishable from one another.
More pressure!
Break through the limit of physical structure—
Pop.
A soft sound, like a water balloon being pricked.
There was no information detachment as he had expected, much less a transformation of form.
There was only the purest, most thorough physical destruction.
The uncontrolled gravity was suddenly released, and the lump of meat was instantly crushed into the finest bloody foam, scattering down like rain.
A puddle of red and white paste was left on the deck, spreading out into a sticky mess no larger than a palm.
A few drops of warm blood splashed onto the tip of Klein’s boot.
The sea breeze blew past, carrying a faint, briny scent of blood.
The scene became excessively quiet for a moment.
Klein looked down at his boot, then at the pile of shredded meat.
The direction was wrong.
The result wasn't surprising, but he had needed to verify it himself to be satisfied.
Pure physical compression wouldn't work—it was like using a sledgehammer to smash a precision lock. The lock would be destroyed, and the internal gears would turn into scrap metal along with it.
Gravity was indeed a way to destroy physical structure, but his current casting precision was essentially zero on a microscopic level. Trying to overcome a lack of precision by increasing force was like trying to make a deaf person hear by shouting louder.
He needed a different approach.
The gravitational method was viable.
What he had gained in the dream had its own logic.
Something was just missing in the middle.
He needed a means to directly touch the information level.
His fingers curled again.
Water churned, and another blue-backed fish was forcibly dragged from the sea by mana, suspended in mid-air. It was slightly smaller than the previous one, the blue on its back so dark it was almost black, its scales reflecting a dull luster in the sunlight.
This time, he didn't rush to act.
Water dripped from the fish's gills—one drop, two drops—hitting the deck beside the remains of its predecessor.
Klein stared at it.
How could he bypass the physical destruction and directly interfere with its state of existence?
He shifted his gaze to his right hand. The array for gravity magic still lingered at his fingertips, a faint mana circuit flowing beneath his skin. He turned his palm up, looking at those mana lines invisible to the naked eye.
—Alchemy?
Not ordinary alchemical extraction, but the system he had been working on for a long time in the manor’s laboratory: analysis and interpretation at the information level. The array disk could read the information characteristics of biological samples; that much had been verified. But the array disk could only 'read,' not 'write.'
If he reversed the reading principle of the array disk—instead of extracting information from matter, he used mana of a specific frequency to resonate with its existing information structure—
“Ophelia.”
“Yes.”
“When you sense those things, your hand—what does it feel like exactly?”
Ophelia’s brow twitched. She looked down at her left hand and thought for a moment.
“Itchy,” she said. “Like something is crawling underneath. It doesn't hurt; I just know it’s there.”
“Do you actively seek them out, or do their signals burrow in on their own?”
“The latter.” Ophelia turned her wrist over to show him; the patterns were expanding and contracting. “It pulses even if I ignore it. It gets stronger when I’m near those fish.”
Klein walked over and crouched beside her. He didn't touch her hand, only leaned in to observe for a few seconds.
Resonance.
The word popped into Klein’s mind.
He crouched beside Ophelia, his gaze falling on her left wrist. The black patterns were pulsing under the skin. It wasn't random; there was a frequency to it, expanding and contracting with extreme regularity. It was almost identical to the rhythm of the information characteristic waveforms he had read on the array disk.
Ophelia didn't pull away. She let him examine her, even pushing her sleeve up another two inches to reveal a complete stretch of the patterns on her forearm. The fine black scales formed irregular veins beneath her white skin, extending from her wrist to three inches below the elbow.
Klein’s gaze followed the patterns.
“Does it hurt?” he asked.
“It’s itchy,” she corrected, shaking her wrist. “Want to study it?”
Klein looked up.
Ophelia’s face was devoid of expression. She looked down at him, her golden pupils reflecting the gray-white light from the sea. With her sleeve pushed up that far, the lines of her forearm were fully exposed—the muscles were well-proportioned, the joints distinct. After being in the sea breeze on the deck, the fine hairs on her skin were standing up.
Klein’s gaze lingered on her forearm for an extra second.
“We can save the flirting for later,” he said, standing up and brushing the dust off his knees.
Ophelia blinked.
“Who’s flirting?”
She pulled her sleeve back down. The movement wasn't fast, but it wasn't hesitant either.
The sea breeze blew in.
Klein didn't look at her again; his mind had already switched back to the task.
The logic behind the phenomenon was clear—the pollution on Ophelia’s wrist originated from the will of the deep sea, and these fish underwater were physical entities generated from information fragments of the sirens.
They were cognate. Their frequencies naturally matched. When the two drew close, resonance at the information level occurred spontaneously.
This explained why she had a reaction the moment they entered the warehouse, and why the patterns on her wrist pulsed more violently as the boat moved further out to sea. The pollution wasn't worsening; the concentration of cognate information in the environment was increasing, triggering a stronger resonance response.
...No, resonance probably wasn't useful yet.
It would definitely play a role, but not right now.
Pure gravitational compression at the physical level didn't work; he had already verified that with the life of one fish. The entry point was entirely wrong. Using a sledgehammer to smash a lock wouldn't open the door, even if the lock broke.
He had to change the key.
Since it was a physical entity composed of information, he would deal with it using means to deconstruct information.
In this world, the composition of matter could be explained by elements.
Klein had deconstructed hundreds of mineral and biological samples in the manor’s laboratory and was intimately familiar with the process—using specific elements to forcibly flush the target’s physical structure, stripping away the physical shell and reducing it to a pure elemental state.
Up to this point, it was still standard procedure.
The key was the next step.
After reducing it to an elemental state, he would use gravity to compress that mass of loose basic particles.
Klein raised his right hand.
The mana circuits at his fingertips were reconstructed. This time, it wasn't pure gravity.
A greenish-white light gathered in his palm, and tiny arcs of electricity danced between his fingers.
Lightning element.
Cast.
There was no thunder. Klein kept the mana output suppressed within an extremely restrained range; the entire release process was unnervingly quiet.
A fine web of electricity draped over the blue-backed fish suspended in mid-air.
There was no smell of burning. The current bypassed conventional tissue destruction paths, permeating through the gaps between scales and the spaces between muscle fibers. It wasn't 'electrocuring' it; it was dismantling it.
Deconstruction.
The fish’s body collapsed in mid-air.
It didn't shatter or explode; it was an extremely smooth dissolution. The scales lost their luster first, becoming transparent before scattering as extremely fine particles. Then came the subcutaneous tissue, muscles, and bones—every layer of structure regressed and decomposed under the flush of the lightning element, returning to the most basic elemental particles.
The entire process took less than three seconds.
A complete fish turned into a turbid, dimly glowing elemental cloud, suspended in place.
Ophelia tilted her head and watched, offering no comment.
But she noticed a detail—the position of that elemental cloud matched the frequency of the pulsing on her left wrist. When the fish was alive, the sense of resonance was weaker; after being dismantled into an elemental state, it actually became stronger.
The physical shell had been stripped away, exposing the information characteristics within more thoroughly.
Klein noticed it too.
He didn't pause.
He turned his left hand over, and the gravity array covered it directly.
Compress.
The elemental cloud rapidly contracted under the influence of gravity. Those loosely floating particles were pulled, squeezed, and stacked toward the center.
Ten inches.
The edges of the cloud were still struggling, with stray particles trying to escape, only to be dragged back one by one by the gravitational field.
Five inches.
The density climbed sharply. The particles in the elemental state began to repel each other; the internal repulsion and external gravity reached a brief balance—the cloud’s contraction slowed down.
Klein increased the output.
Three inches. Two inches. One inch.
When it was compressed to this scale, light spots began to appear on the surface of the cloud. Bright spots flickered in and out without pattern, like something being squeezed out under extreme pressure.
The elemental state couldn't hold.
Elemental particles would also collapse in the face of a spatial collapse of this magnitude—the physical structure had already been dismantled by the lightning element, and now even the elemental state itself was disintegrating.
Only the lowest level remained.
Pop.
An extremely faint noise. Lighter than a bubble bursting.
The elemental cloud was gone.
In its place, there was nothing—
No.
A light particle the size of a needle tip hung in mid-air.
Ethereal blue.
Klein stared at it.
The light particle didn't move. No drifting, no rotating. The sea breeze blew past, but it had no effect on it. Sunlight hit it, but it didn't reflect, refract, or absorb. It did not interact with any physical phenomena.
No mass. No smell. No temperature.
But it was there.
Klein extended a finger, tentatively drawing two inches closer.
His fingertip felt nothing. Not hot, not cold, not numb.
All the information contained within a fish was compressed into this single light particle.
Ophelia walked over then. She looked down at the blue light, her left hand subconsciously clenching.
“It’s calling out,” she said.
Klein looked at her.
“It’s not a sound.” Ophelia’s brow furrowed and then relaxed. “It’s like—the thing on my wrist recognizes it.”
Klein withdrew his finger and took a step back.
He looked at his hands.
His left hand still held the afterglow of the gravity array, and his right fingertips felt a faint stinging from the dissipated lightning element. The two powers had connected in less than ten seconds—dismantling, compressing, stripping, until only the indivisible minimum unit remained.
The entire experimental chain was complete.
The lightning element dismantled the physical shell. Gravity crushed the elemental state. What was left was pure information—the entire definition of why this fish was 'a fish' and not a stone or a piece of seaweed, concentrated into a needle-tip-sized blue light particle.
This process had no corresponding name in the system of alchemy.
It wasn't extraction, distillation, or fractionation; it wasn't any known method of separation.
He had touched the boundary of the rules. Alchemy dealt with the relationship between matter and matter, the transformation between element and element. But what he had just done crossed that line, reaching directly into the structure beneath matter to pull out the information that defined it.
It was even more excessive than human transmutation.
Human transmutation merely used living people as materials; essentially, it still revolved around the physical level. But operations at the information level—
Klein searched through all the literature and cases he knew in his mind. The sages' manuscripts, the forbidden technique catalogs of the Imperial Alchemy Institute, even the records of underground research classified as heresy.
Nothing.
There was no precedent.
In that case, he would tentatively call it—Information Alchemy.
Rate on N.U.
