In the intervals between sailing, the charcoal pencil in Klein's hand came to a halt.
The notebook was filled with deduction formulas and distribution maps. The ink hadn't fully dried yet, and as the sea breeze blew, the charcoal powder blurred at the edges of the paper. But he was no longer looking at those things.
An even more outrageous thought had leaped into his mind.
He rested his pen on the spine of the notebook, wedging it there to keep it from rolling away. Then he raised his left hand and turned it over, palm facing upward.
Mana flowed in reverse through his circuits.
He had performed this process many times—the skin of his fingertips lost its color, and the outlines of flesh and bone blurred and faded within an azure glow, gradually turning into a mass of surging lightning element.
Elementalization.
A hidden trump card for survival used by old-school mages; textbooks even dedicated an entire chapter to it. When faced with a knight in close-quarters combat, turning parts of the body or even the whole into an elemental state meant that swords would only strike empty air. The theory was elegant, but the threshold for practical execution was extremely high. The level of precision required to control one's own physical structure during elementalization approached alchemical standards. A single slip-up during the reversal could lead to structural errors, resulting in functional damage at best and permanent physical deformity at worst.
Klein used to treat this move as a shield for when he was being hit, a purely defensive measure he hadn't studied much. The reason was simple—he wasn't a combat-oriented mage, so the cost-effectiveness of mastering it was too low.
But the situation had changed.
The experimental chain involving that blue-backed fish earlier replayed in his mind over and over. Matter, dismantled into an elemental state. Elemental state, compressed into information light particles. Two steps; the direction was correct, but the tools were wrong—dismantling the shell with lightning was an external intervention, and gravity casting was also an external intervention. The entire process involved him standing on the outside and smashing his way in.
However, a mage's elementalization was different.
This was a transformation initiated from within. It was the caster actively transitioning their own physical structure toward an elemental state. The direction was the same, but the driving force was entirely different. One was using a hammer to crack a walnut; the other was the walnut splitting open on its own.
So—
If he were to overlay a miniature gravity convergence while in an elementalized state, further compressing the already elementalized body tissue...
He stared at his translucent left hand. The outline of his finger bones flickered within the flow of lightning elements, each joint becoming a phantom traced by light. The veins on the back of his hand had vanished, replaced by fine streams of elements flowing slowly along the paths the vessels once took.
Interesting.
After elementalization, the 'skeleton' of matter remained, much like a house with its walls and roof removed but its load-bearing pillars left untouched. What were these pillars? They were the constraint of the magic circuits themselves on the elemental state—the caster's will acting as the container.
What if he tightened that constraint? Not pressing from the outside, but from the inside, using his own magic circuits as a mold to actively squeeze the elemental state toward the information level—
His right hand had already begun to condense a gravity array. It was miniature, with precision dialed to the maximum, its range of effect covering only the last two joints of his left index and middle fingers.
Two fingers. Give it a try. Control the variables; the loss would be acceptable.
A second before the array fully formed.
Snap.
A hand reached out from the side, fingers closing and locking firmly around his wrist.
The magic circuits were forcibly severed. The process of elementalization ground to a halt; his fingertips still retained a translucent quality, but from the wrist up, his skin had returned to its normal color. The boundary between the two states glowed with an unnatural bluish-white, looking somewhat eerie.
Klein looked up.
Ophelia had left the bow at some point and was now standing to his right. She didn't crouch down, but looked down at him with lowered eyes, her gaze pinned to his left hand, which hadn't yet fully returned to its flesh-and-blood state.
The wind blew her hair against the side of her face, but she didn't move to brush it away.
“What are you doing?”
Her tone was flat. The end of the sentence didn't rise, making it sound less like a question and more like she was giving him a chance to explain himself.
But the hand gripping his wrist—her right hand—was held very tight. Her fingertips pressed against the pulse on the inside of his wrist bone with precise force, just enough to be uncomfortable without causing injury.
Klein's gaze followed hers as he looked around.
At the edge of the deck, although the heap of deformed dead meat he had kicked overboard had sunk, the turbid fluid that had seeped out remained as a dark water stain. The sea breeze couldn't dry it, and it spread into the cracks of the wooden planks.
He understood immediately.
She had seen what he was doing, and then she had thought of that thing—the fish eye growing at the end of an intestine, the fish bones piercing the heart in reverse, the scales all embedded backward into the muscle. The product of physical reorganization after an information encoding error.
And then she saw him preparing to do the same thing to his own fingers.
“I didn't plan to compress myself into that monstrosity.” Klein dispersed his mana. The translucent quality of his left hand faded inch by inch, and color spread back from his wrist to his fingertips as his body temperature returned. The section of his wrist she was gripping felt warm.
Ophelia did not let go.
“The look in your eyes just now,” she said, “was no different from when you were dissecting that fish.”
The words weren't heavy, but they struck true.
Klein opened his mouth, wanting to say something to smooth it over.
“When you looked at that fish, you were thinking about structure, data, and how to dismantle it next.” Ophelia's thumb pressed against his wrist bone with some force. “Just now, when you looked at your own fingers, the look was exactly the same.”
“...It was just an academic inquiry,” Klein said, his voice dropping an octave.
“Inquiries can be done with a pen.”
“Some things can't be confirmed without trying them firsthand—”
“The fish tried it firsthand.” Ophelia tilted her head slightly, gesturing toward the water stain on the deck. “What was confirmed? A pile of rotten meat.”
Klein went silent.
This was indeed a bit abnormal.
“Besides, if anything were to really happen, you've already stopped me.” He tried a different angle, attempting to use the outcome to justify the process.
“And what if I had looked back a step too late?”
It wasn't a question. It was a statement.
Klein hesitated for a moment before deciding to tell the truth. “Then at most, I would have lost a fingernail.” He flexed the fingers she was gripping. “I kept the coverage of the gravity array extremely tight.”
Ophelia's expression didn't change after hearing this.
Silence lasted for two seconds.
She simply continued to stare at Klein, a trace of indignation flickering in her golden pupils.
“Fine,” he said. “I was being reckless.”
Ophelia watched him for several seconds. It wasn't a scrutinizing look, but one of confirmation—confirming whether this 'fine' was a genuine admission or just a brush-off before he went right back to it.
She apparently finished her confirmation.
Her fingers loosened one by one. A ring of faint red finger marks remained on his wrist, though they would fade before long.
But she didn't return to the bow.
She glanced at the spot at the base of the mast—next to the mooring post Klein was leaning against, there was just enough room for another person to sit. She tucked the hem of her cloak inward and sat down directly. Her back rested against the wood of the mast, her arms crossed over her chest. One leg was bent while the other stretched out, her boot heel clicking against the deck.
“Think right here,” she said. “I will watch you think.”
Klein looked down at her sitting posture, then at his open notebook. There was less than a fist's width between them; her shoulder was almost touching his upper arm.
“...Are you supervising me?”
“Yes.”
It was crisp and concise, without a single extra word.
Klein pulled the pen from the spine of the book and reopened the notebook. No words had been written on the blank page yet, and the tip of the charcoal pencil hovered in mid-air for a moment.
“I can't write with you sitting here.”
“That is your problem.”
The sea breeze blew in from the front, fluttering a corner of the notebook. Klein used one hand to hold the page down and began to write with the other.
He wrote two lines.
Then he stopped.
“What is it?”
Klein did not speak; he simply leaned his head against Ophelia's shoulder.
“I'm tired. Let me rest for a bit.”
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