A grain of ethereal blue light hung in mid-air.
Klein and Ophelia stared at it simultaneously.
Neither of them spoke.
The sea breeze continued to blow, and the canvas slapped against the mast as usual, but the attention of both was pinned entirely on that needle-sized object.
After about twenty breaths, the glow began to tremble.
Ophelia took half a step back.
The black patterns on her left wrist, which had been pulsing rhythmically like a metronome, were now completely haywire, thrumming chaotically beneath her skin. The vibration caused the muscles in her forearm to tighten.
"It's about to collapse."
Klein didn't move.
He was waiting.
This particle, which carried the biological base code, could not exist in the physical world for long. Stripped of its physical shell and its elemental substrate, a single string of exposed information simply could not withstand the rejection of the laws of reality.
He knew in his heart that from the moment the grain of light formed, the countdown had begun.
He counted to the twenty-third breath.
The grain of light shattered.
The blue light faded, and the forcibly compressed elemental cloud briefly reappeared, floating in the air for less than a second before its shape began to cave outward.
Immediately following that, the elemental state fell back toward the physical state—
The process was so fast there was no room to intervene.
Squelch.
A mass of something slammed onto the deck.
Klein pivoted on his heel, the tip of his boot barely avoiding the splashing turbid fluid.
It was a heap of meat that grew in a way that defied all logic.
No.
Calling it a heap of meat was being generous.
When the first fish had been crushed by pure gravity, the shredded meat was still meat, and the bones were still bones; one could still distinguish the original parts. But this thing before him... its source information had been completely scrambled during the process of extraction and collapse, and matter could only forcibly regenerate according to the misaligned code.
It was as if an architectural blueprint had been shredded and haphazardly taped back together, yet the construction crew was still forced to build the skyscraper according to that chaotic drawing.
A fish eye grew at the end of an intestine, its pupil gray and white, staring lifelessly at the sky.
Fish bones had pierced through half the heart in reverse, the sharp tips poking out of the chambers, draped with a segment of unknown membranous tissue.
Scales didn't grow on the skin; instead, they were all embedded deep within the crimson muscle fibers, one by one, arranged with eerie precision.
The instruction for "even scale spacing" in the code had been faithfully executed, but the location of that execution was entirely wrong.
Skeleton, organs, and flesh were kneaded together without logic. The moment it took shape, it was already a dead corpse.
A scent mixed with brine and the smell of ruptured internal organs drifted through the air—not thick, but enough to be choking.
Klein crouched down and poked the edge of the mass with his blood-stained charcoal pencil.
The tip sank in; the texture was loose, completely lacking the elasticity normal muscle tissue should have.
He used the tip of the pencil to peel back a layer of skin. Beneath it was bone, and a complete gill cover was wedged into a crack in the bone.
Nothing was in the right place.
Nothing matched.
"It seems that relying solely on magic for forced extraction results in a very short shelf life."
He stood up, reviewing the process in his mind.
"Twenty-three breaths, then the information automatically falls back."
"When the information state can't hold, it collapses back to the elemental state. When the elemental state can't hold, it collapses further back to the physical state."
"With every layer it falls, a portion of information is lost. The final result... is this."
Ophelia walked around to the other side to take a look.
"It grew quite haphazardly," she said.
The word was exceptionally precise.
Klein used the sole of his boot to push the heap of things to the edge of the ship. He noticed that his left index finger had been pricked by a fish bone, and a red dot of blood was seeping from the tip of his finger.
Even a bone growing in the wrong place could still prick someone.
He put his finger in his mouth and sucked on it; it was salty.
As expected, information determined the configuration of matter. Once the information was scattered, the resulting matter was just a pile of waste.
The fact that the fragments inside the sirens could generate perfect living fish proved that the will of the deep sea possessed complete encapsulation and decompression techniques, with no information loss or encoding errors.
What he had just done was, in essence, merely a violent dismantling.
He had taken it apart, but what then? He had held a grain of pure information in his hand, watched it for twenty-three breaths, watched it shatter on its own, and watched it turn into a pile of waste.
Anyone can tear down a house, but after the demolition, one must know how to classify and archive the materials. Otherwise, the dismantling is pointless.
The limitations of this one-way destruction were too obvious. If he couldn't establish a stable constraint mechanism in the information state—some kind of container or framework to lock that grain of light and prevent it from collapsing—the extracted material wouldn't last even a minute.
Beside him, Ophelia shook her left hand.
The patterns on her wrist were still jumping, but the frequency had begun to fall back. Now that the grain of light was gone and the resonance source had disappeared, her reaction was fading accordingly.
The movement beneath the water was still approaching.
Ophelia raised her left hand again, palm facing outward, her brow slightly furrowed.
"There are more," she said. "The nearest group is less than five fathoms from the bottom of the boat."
Klein brushed the dust off his hands and kicked the deformed fish corpse into the sea.
With a splash, it sank.
"The fishing ends here; the data is sufficient."
He walked to the edge of the ship and glanced down into the water.
The gray-green seawater churned in the shadow cast by the hull, revealing nothing in its depths. But if Ophelia said they were there, then they were there.
"You said earlier that the types were very mixed?"
"Yes."
"Are there any... that aren't fish?"
Ophelia tilted her head and remained silent for a few seconds, as if carefully discerning through the turbid signals.
"...There is one," she finally spoke. "Its blood aura is heavier than the others, but it's far away, not in this area."
She raised her hand, pointing toward the northeast.
"That way."
Klein pulled the nautical chart from his inner pocket and unfolded it, his finger tracing the direction she pointed.
That area of the sea was not within the anomalous zones Nelisa had marked; it was further away, closer to the open sea.
"Are we going?" Ophelia asked.
Klein looked at the sky, then at her left hand.
The patterns were still pulsing.
"Can you still hold up?"
"Hold up for what?" Ophelia pulled her sleeve down to cover her wrist, her tone flat. "It doesn't hurt."
Itchiness wasn't pleasant either.
Klein didn't say it out loud.
"Let's go." He folded the nautical chart. "We'll circle around for a look. We won't get too close; we'll observe from a distance."
The sail turned.
The hull carved an arc across the sea, cutting into the new course.
The wind poured in from the side, the canvas bulging, and the ship's speed slowed slightly.
Klein leaned against the mast, opened his notebook, and began to organize the experimental records from just now.
His handwriting was a bit neater than before; at least this time he wasn't lying on the deck to write.
Halfway through, the pen stopped.
He looked up and glanced at Ophelia's back.
She stood at the bow, her cloak fluttering backward in the wind. Despite the swaying of the deck, her figure remained motionless.
Good.
Let's go see what that "big one" really is.
Rate on N.U.
