The workshop shutters were only about a third open, allowing several narrow shafts of light to slice through the gaps and land right on the edge of the workbench. The scent of potions mixed with the dry smell of mineral powder, forming a thin backdrop in the poorly ventilated room.
The water tank sat in the center of the table. Its walls were made of thick, frosted alchemical glass, semi-transparent, allowing only a blurry dark silhouette to be seen moving slowly through the water.
The sea folk opened her mouth.
There was no baring of teeth, no tightening of throat muscles. Her lips parted only slightly, revealing a row of fine, pearlescent teeth.
Sound emerged from that mouth.
Klein couldn't understand it.
But he judged that she was speaking. That string of sounds wasn't a single-frequency screech or an animalistic growl—it had rises and falls, pauses, clear divisions between syllables, and shifts in emphasis. It was like a structured chain.
The frequency was high, with a humming vibration like a film of water; the trailing notes were long, their edges blurring as they dissipated in the air. The human ear could only capture about sixty percent of it, with the remaining forty percent falling outside the normal range of hearing—but Klein's ears still caught some fragmented high-frequency tails, like the distant buzzing of wings.
Klein wasn't in a hurry.
The inscription stone was glowing.
A flurry of light patterns raced across the surface of the thumb-sized stone on the edge of the table; the coding array was running at full speed, the acoustic capture layer absorbing all the raw signals.
The sea folk finished speaking. The sound ended on a rising note—a characteristic of a question.
It seemed that in any language, the pitch at the end of a question always goes up.
Then she closed her mouth, her gray vertical slit pupils fixed on Klein.
The flow of light on the inscription stone slowed. The computation stabilized, spitting out the preliminary mapping results.
Klein reached out and picked up the inscription stone.
Two lines of extremely fine elemental light script surfaced on the stone, flickering word by word:
—What are you looking at?
—What are you going to do?
Klein ran the two sentences through his mind.
Reasonable enough.
Klein cleared his throat.
He’d start with a greeting.
“Hello.”
The inscription stone received his voice signal, and the internal elemental flow ran in reverse—reverse-coding human language into the sea folk's vocal patterns. The stone vibrated, and a string of composite sound waves, almost entirely inaudible to the human ear, spread out from it.
The frequency fluctuated high and low, carrying a watery tone with a slight gurgling at the end.
It was the language of the sea folk.
The reaction in the tank was instantaneous.
The sea folk’s entire upper body snapped back. Her tail coiled tightly, the edge of her tail fin striking the tank wall and sending up a spray of water; a few drops landed on the table, slowly soaking into the wood grain. Those gray vertical slit pupils suddenly dilated to a width Klein had never seen before.
The slits had stretched almost into circles.
It wasn't fear—pupils constrict in fear; this was the expansion reaction of extreme shock.
Her translucent ear fins stood straight up, facing the direction of the inscription stone, remaining motionless for three seconds. The two thin gill slits on the side of her neck also opened slightly—much like a human would unconsciously gasp in shock, her gill slits were doing the same.
Then her mouth suddenly began a high-speed output.
A long string of high-frequency vibrations rose from beneath the water, bubbles churning, the sound wave density more than triple that of the previous two sentences. The inscription stone flickered wildly as the coding flow swallowed the data at full speed.
Klein waited a beat.
Once the light patterns stabilized, a new translation surfaced on the stone:
—You you you... can speak?
Klein stared at the translation for two seconds.
Three repeated “you”s. A stutter? No—it should be a repetition caused by extreme shock. The inscription stone had faithfully reproduced this trait, indicating high translation accuracy.
However, the phrasing “can speak” was a bit odd. In human expression, it would be “you can speak my language” or “you understand what I'm saying.” Her original sentence likely lacked such nuance—or perhaps the stone's semantic mapping wasn't precise enough yet, collapsing several concepts into one word.
It didn't matter. As long as they could communicate.
“It's not that I can speak it,” Klein pointed at the inscription stone. “This thing is helping with the translation.”
The inscription stone ran again, sending the sentence out in the sea folk's language.
The sea folk’s gaze moved from Klein’s face to the faintly glowing stone. Something flickered in her gray vertical slit pupils—it was hard to tell if it was confusion or curiosity. Her upper body leaned forward slightly, and her coiled tail relaxed, no longer in the tense, ready-to-launch state it had been in.
Her alert level dropped a notch.
Interesting. Simply because they could communicate, her defensive posture had noticeably softened.
“I'm going to ask you a few questions,” Klein said at a steady pace. “You don't have to answer if you don't want to, but don't lie.”
The translation was sent.
The sea folk stared at the inscription stone for a moment, and then that watery vibration rang out again.
The stone translated:
—Ask.
One word. Short and to the point.
Klein hadn't expected her to agree so quickly. It made things easier.
“What is your name?”
Silence.
A longer silence than expected.
The sea folk’s ear fins twitched slightly, slowly flattening from their upright position and pressing back against her cheeks. Her gray vertical slit pupils stared at the water's surface, her focus unfocused, as if she wasn't looking at anything but rather searching through her own mind.
She searched for a long time.
One of her hands unconsciously brushed against the edge of her tail fin, her fingertip gently stroking a layer of scales that had begun to shed. It didn't look like a purposeful action—it was more like someone absentmindedly tugging at their sleeve while lost in thought.
The inscription stone finally captured her response, low-frequency and brief:
—No name.
Klein’s expression didn't change, but a string in his mind was pulled.
It was the same.
Exactly the same as Aphros.
Biological entities decompressed from within sirens were all blank slates—no names, no memories. They appeared in this world out of thin air, with complete biological functions and basic cognitive abilities, but the answer to the question “Who am I?” was blank.
He continued.
“Do you know where you came from?”
—Don't know.
“When you woke up, what was the first thing you saw?”
The sea folk tilted her head.
—Water.
“What about before the water?”
A longer pause. Her ear fins trembled slightly, that unfocused searching for information reappearing. Her gill slits opened and closed again, like a silent sigh.
—There was no “before water.”
When these four words surfaced on the inscription stone, there was no expression on her face. It wasn't calm—it was simply that there was no emotional trigger in that direction.
Klein leaned back against his chair, his fingers unconsciously tapping twice on the armrest.
An expected answer, but valuable to confirm every time. This wasn't an isolated case. Abnormal creatures born from sirens—at least the two he had encountered so far—all displayed the same cognitive trait: a clear starting point for their existence, but absolute nothingness before that. Even the concept of “no memory” didn't quite apply, because they didn't even believe there should be anything in that direction.
It wasn't that they had “forgotten”; it was that there had “never been anything.”
“Last question.” Klein stared at the coiled fish tail in the tank, a few shed scales swirling in the water. “Do you know what ‘the sea’ is?”
The inscription stone sent the question.
The sea folk’s reaction was different this time.
She didn't search, she didn't pause; her gray vertical slit pupils met Klein's directly. The slits narrowed slightly. The gill slits on her neck also tightened—not in tension, but in a kind of... certainty.
—The sea is the sea.
Four words. No hesitation, no searching, as if the answer wasn't stored in memory but carved into her bones.
Klein slowly flipped the inscription stone over; the flow of light patterns continued to run.
All specific memories were blank, yet the concept of “the sea” was a priori, requiring no learning.
Interesting.
The sea folk’s tail swayed once in the water, a small movement.
Her gray vertical slit pupils remained on him, the slits reflecting the fragmented light filtering through the workshop shutters.
Then she spoke again—this time, it wasn't an answer to a question.
The inscription stone ran for a second, and a new translation surfaced:
—Why do you smell like the sea too?
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