The next morning arrived.
Klein had to force himself to wake up.
He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling for three seconds. His brain wasn't fully online yet, but his body was already reclaiming memories from the night before—fragments of consciousness surging to the surface in a non-linear, jumbled mess.
Yes.
Last night had indeed been an unforgettable one.
From the moment they left home until now, punctuated by three bumpy days in a carriage and then heading out to sea to deal with sea monsters—it had been quite a while since he and Ophelia had been intimate.
Intimate in the narrow sense.
Last night's... well, let's just say that with the debt of so many days being cleared all at once, neither side had been particularly polite.
Klein turned his head.
Ophelia was sleeping to his right.
She lay on her side, facing him. Her golden hair was scattered across the pillow, with a few strands draped over her cheek, covering half of one eye. Her breathing was steady, the rise and fall of her chest slight.
The blanket was only pulled up to her collarbone, revealing the clean, sharp lines of her shoulders. It created a subtle contrast with her peaceful sleeping face—when awake, this woman practically radiated a "do not trifle with me" energy, but in sleep, that oppressive aura vanished entirely. What remained made it difficult for Klein to think clearly.
He watched her for a few seconds.
His gaze moved from her eyelashes to the tip of her nose, then slid down to her lips.
Her mouth was slightly open, with a shallow indentation on her lower lip—pressed there by a fold in the blanket.
He wanted to keep watching.
But Klein didn't intend to linger in this morning indulgence.
A different string in his mind was pulled taut. From the moment he had seen the sea folk on the docks yesterday, the question regarding Aphros had been weighing on his heart, growing heavier by the hour.
The sea folk's directional reaction to Ophelia was so obvious, yet Aphros showed nothing at all—until he figured this out, he wouldn't be able to sleep soundly.
Klein gently propped himself up, trying not to make a sound.
The mattress dipped and then sprang back. He shifted his weight to the left, intending to get out from that side of the bed.
His movements were very careful.
Even so, Ophelia’s brow twitched.
It seemed that sleeping in a new place had brought back her heightened state of alertness.
Klein paused for two seconds, waiting for her breathing to stabilize again before he continued moving.
Before getting out of bed, he glanced back.
Ophelia’s hand reached halfway out from under the covers, resting on the spot where he had just been lying. Her fingers were loosely curled, as if trying to grasp something.
He leaned down and used two fingers to pinch her cheek.
Not too hard, not too soft. About the same pressure as yesterday morning.
Ophelia’s brow furrowed, and her lips moved slightly as she mumbled something incoherent. She didn't open her eyes. Her fingers tightened a bit, clutching the edge of the blanket.
Klein almost laughed out loud.
Her reaction was exactly like a cat whose face had been rubbed—annoyed, but too lazy to open its eyes and argue with you, merely letting out a grumble to express its displeasure before going back to sleep.
He made a mental note of it. Images like this could be useful later.
Klein tucked the corner of the blanket back around her, his mouth moving without making a sound.
Then he stood up, walked barefoot to the door, and picked up his coat draped over the back of a chair.
After dressing, he opened the door. The hinges didn't creak—Nelisa's place even had the door axles oiled; the attention to detail was flawless.
The corridor was quiet.
Sunlight streamed in from the window at the end, casting a long, bright strip across the floor.
Klein took one last look back.
Through the crack in the door, Ophelia rolled over to face the wall. Her golden hair covered half the pillow, and the outline of her shoulder blades peeked out from above the blanket.
He closed the door and headed down the corridor toward the alchemical workshop.
His pace was a bit faster than usual.
That member of the sea folk should have had an entire night to adapt to the water tank. If Nelisa’s people had done as he asked—adjusting the water temperature, salinity, and lighting conditions to the required levels—then this morning would be the optimal window for communication.
The answer to the mystery of Aphros might just be soaking in that tank.
...
...
On the way to the alchemical workshop, two men stood at the end of the corridor wearing gray-blue shirts with the Silver Scale Chamber of Commerce crest pinned to their chests. When they saw Klein approaching, one nodded while the other stepped half a pace to the side to clear the path.
“Was there any movement last night?” Klein asked.
“She made a fuss for the first half of the night.” The man’s voice was a bit raspy, with dark circles under his eyes—clearly, he hadn't slept well. “She didn't settle down until well past midnight. It wasn't loud, but you could hear the splashing even through the door.”
Klein nodded without saying more and pushed the door open.
The lighting in the workshop wasn't great.
Only one window was open, its shutters half-closed, causing the sunlight to slice into parallel bright lines across the floor. The air was thick with the faint scent of potions mixed with a briny sea smell wafting from the water tank—it was stronger than what he’d smelled at the docks, trapped in the room and settling in a layer over everything.
The sea folk was in the corner of the tank.
The tank had been brought in overnight by Nelisa’s people. It was about six feet long, four feet wide, and the walls were nearly half a palm thick. The material wasn't ordinary glass—Klein tapped the outer wall with his knuckles, and the vibration frequency was low and dense; its impact resistance should be quite high.
It was sufficient.
The moment the tapping sound reached the water, the sea folk’s entire body jolted.
She huddled in the farthest corner of the tank, her tail curled against the wall and her upper body pressed as low as possible, her arms shielding her front. Those vertical slit pupils were pinned dead on Klein, the pupils constricted into thin lines.
Yesterday at the docks, this creature could still prop herself up with her arms and snap at everyone with low growls.
Now, she looked like this—
Klein glanced at the bottom of the tank. A few dark scales had fallen off and settled on the floor of the tank, their edges curled and white.
She was shedding.
A stress response.
Being locked in a strange, cramped, transparent container with no cover, surrounded by unfamiliar smells and sounds. For a living creature plucked from the deep sea, this night was probably more harrowing than being trapped in a crevice of a coral reef.
At least a coral reef was something she understood.
Klein didn't get any closer.
He stopped about four paces from the tank, pulled over a chair, and sat down.
He didn't speak.
He just sat there with his legs crossed, one hand on his knee and the other hanging off the armrest, his posture so relaxed he didn't look like he was facing a dangerous biological specimen from the deep.
The sea folk tilted her head to look at him.
Those gray vertical slit pupils were still tightly constricted, but at least she was no longer in a stance that suggested she was ready to shatter the glass with her tail. Her upper body remained huddled, arms shielding her chest, and her ear fins were pressed flat against her head—Klein had seen this movement on the docks; sea birds would tuck their wings the same way when startled.
A defensive posture. Not a prelude to an attack.
There was a big difference.
Klein waited for about two minutes. It wasn't long, but in a quiet room heavy with the smell of the sea, two minutes was enough for the air to turn thick.
He spoke.
“Can you understand me?”
His voice wasn't high or low, just enough to carry those four paces to the tank. He didn't intentionally soften it, nor was there any hint of comfort—he didn't plan to coddle her.
Coddling a deep-sea creature of unknown intelligence was either useless or counterproductive.
The sea folk gave no reaction.
It wasn't the kind of non-reaction that was faked. Klein could tell. Her ear fins did twitch—an instinctive tremor caused by sound waves, purely physical. But judging by the focus of her vertical slit pupils, these syllables were no different to her than the environmental noise outside the tank.
It was all just noise.
He tried a different phrasing.
“Where did you come from?”
The sea folk stared at him. The sunlight filtering through the shutters was reflected in her gray irises, and her vertical slit pupils dilated slightly—not in response to the meaning of his words, but as an instinctive tracking of the change in the sound's source.
Extrapolating from this detail: her auditory system was sharp, but the corresponding semantic decoding module was likely a blank slate, or at least completely incompatible with human language.
Klein tried two more dialects and even the Ancient Common Tongue, but the results were the same.
The sea folk maintained her huddled posture, occasionally tilting her head, her tail tip swaying unconsciously twice in the water. The few scales that had fallen from the edge of her tail fin were pushed by the current against the glass wall.
Communication failure.
Expected, but still a bit troublesome.
Klein leaned back against the chair.
The language barrier itself didn't surprise him. The biological information decompressed from the sirens came from a genetic blueprint encompassed by the concepts of the will of the deep sea. The sea folk’s linguistic system—if she even had one—would have no overlap with any language on land.
To expect her to suddenly blurt out "hello"? That wasn't science; that was a fairy tale.
The problem was: without communication, he couldn't move forward.
Indirect observation could provide behavioral data, but deep causal relationships couldn't be discerned just by looking.
He needed to build a bridge.
Schemes were already running through Klein’s mind.
Information Alchemy...
If he could use Information Alchemy to create a translator—one that could perfectly translate a language even if it had never been recorded before.
Ordinary alchemy might not be able to do it... then again, it might. After all, many alchemical feats were the products of unknown principles where "I think it can work" and then it actually does. The history of alchemy was full of such examples.
However, Information Alchemy could certainly achieve it.
Klein stood up.
The chair legs let out a short, sharp scrape against the stone floor. The sea folk’s translucent ear fins immediately stood up, and her entire upper body shrank back two inches.
Her curled tail stiffened, and her tail fin spread out against the bottom of the tank, ready to launch at any moment.
Klein ignored her.
He turned toward the workbench on the other side of the workshop.
Nelisa's alchemical workshop was well-equipped. Basic distillers, grinding tables, and elemental analyzers were all present, and the reagent bottles on the shelves were organized into four rows by elemental category. It wasn't top-tier equipment, but for what he needed to do right now, it was enough.
He pulled a blank inscription stone from the shelf—about the size of a thumb, its surface polished and its crystal structure uniform.
Information Alchemy didn't care about the material of the carrier, but an inscription stone had high elemental density and could carry a larger volume of coding, making it suitable for a tool that required continuous computation.
Klein picked up an etching needle from the table and began carving the basic coding framework into the six faces of the inscription stone.
The first layer: An acoustic signals capture array. The frequency range had to be set to the maximum—the sounds the sea folk made underwater might not be the same as in the air, so infrasound and ultrasound frequencies that the human ear couldn't hear had to be included.
The second layer: An elemental coding disassembly module. It would break the raw signals into the smallest coding units and analyze the patterns of their permutations and combinations step by step.
The third layer: A self-iterating algorithm for semantic mapping. The initial state was a blank slate, designed to learn on its own from the continuous data input.
A three-layer architecture.
The structure wasn't complex, but the volume of coding being inscribed was massive. The etching needle moved quickly and densely across the surface of the inscription stone, the tiny scratching sounds filling the quiet workshop.
The sea folk stopped moving.
She wasn't scared into stillness.
Klein caught a glimpse with his peripheral vision—her posture had changed. Her upper body was still huddled, but her head was tilted at an angle, and the focus of her gray vertical slit pupils had moved from Klein’s face to his hand.
She was staring at the etching needle.
Staring at the movements of his fingers.
This was interesting.
Klein didn't stop his work, but a note flashed through his mind: she has an observational interest in fine movements. It wasn't a surveillance driven by fear, but something closer to... curiosity?
The information was recorded.
As the etching needle completed the final line of code, Klein held the inscription stone up to the light to check it. The carvings on all six sides were correct, the elemental flow within the crystal was stable, and there were no coding conflicts.
He pulled a clean handkerchief from his pocket, wiped the inscription stone, and placed it in his palm.
The next step was activation.
The activation method for Information Alchemy wasn't complicated; it essentially involved feeding initial energy into the coding framework to start the elemental flow according to the preset rules.
Klein injected a small amount of mana into the inscription stone.
The surface of the stone lit up briefly. It was short—a flash of white light that vanished instantly—but the internal elemental flow had begun its cycle.
The acoustic capture array was the first to start—Klein felt a very slight vibration travel up from his palm; the inscription stone was "listening."
It was absorbing all the surrounding sounds. The sound of the water moving slightly in the tank, the tiny pops of bubbles bursting against the glass, the cry of a sea bird outside—all of it was being coded, disassembled, and stored.
But these were all environmental noises. They were useless.
He needed the sea folk’s voice.
Klein set the inscription stone on the edge of the workbench, closest to the water tank. Then he stepped back four paces and sat back down in the chair.
The sea folk’s vertical slit pupils darted between him and the inscription stone twice.
Her ear fins twitched slightly.
Klein looked at her.
He didn't speak, he didn't move; he just watched.
He was waiting.
Waiting for her to make a sound—any sound. A syllable, a low growl, even the vibration of her vocal cords from a bubble bursting in the water would do. The inscription stone only needed one seed sample to begin the first round of analysis.
But the sea folk didn't make a sound.
She was watching him too.
In those gray vertical slit pupils, the slits had widened more than before. It was no longer the narrow line of fear-induced constriction.
Klein read something from within that layer of gray. His existing cognitive framework couldn't precisely categorize it.
It wasn't hostility. It wasn't fear.
It was closer to—
A kind of scrutiny.
As if she were analyzing him as well.
Klein met her gaze.
The only sound in the workshop was the water. The inscription stone glowed with a nearly invisible layer of faint light on the edge of the table, waiting to receive its first piece of valid data.
Then, the sea folk opened her mouth.
Rate on N.U.
