“The Lunalith used to be on a slightly higher level than this, but Fuuga Haan had it moved down here. From what I heard from young Miss Anne, he was afraid you might be able to decipher it and use it to your advantage.”
“...”
“It’s this way. Follow me.”
Souji led us farther in until we reached a small, room-like chamber. Amid a heap of wooden beams and stone blocks that looked completely out of place stood a black, board-shaped object emitting a faint, pale light.
It resembled an ancient monolith—something you’d expect to see in an old sci-fi film or a Monster R**cher game—cracked and crumbling around the edges.
Souji gestured towards it. “Fuuga had the Lunalith brought in here and sealed off with stone and lumber. The walls around it are all made of that same metallike stuff, so it wasn’t so much about hiding it as it was about making it harder to reach. Maybe he heard the story about how Merula once snuck in and caught a glimpse of it.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “If he’d left it where it was, I could’ve sent the Black Cats to infiltrate and copy down what they saw on it. Not that I was planning to though.”
We stood before the Lunalith in that cluttered chamber. As we watched, text began to shimmer faintly across its surface.
This text...
Characters continued to appear on the surface one after another. My eyes widened in surprise, captivated by the sight of scripts both familiar and foreign.
“Hold on, Souma. Are you okay?” Liscia asked, concerned by how I’d frozen up.
“Oh, sure,” I said, snapping back to my senses. “I’m fine. Just fine.” I nodded to reassure her.
“So, are you able to read it?”
“No, not perfectly.”
“Huh?! Aren’t you supposed to be able to?”
“Oh, I can read it. I just can’t fully understand it,” I said, pointing to the tablet. “There are four languages here, and none of them are mine. This might be hard to picture since there’s only one common tongue on this continent, but... Well, it’s like the Seadian language is for you.”
“So...like how I can’t understand it without you or Tomoe?”
Liscia nodded as she caught on. Four different languages were carved into the Lunalith. I could identify English and Chinese with certainty. One of the others was probably Spanish—I noticed an El in there, like the title of that famous South American song, “El Cóndor Pasa.” The last one...I had no idea. The script looked like it could be Indian or Arabic, but wait... Spanish had been the third most spoken language after English and Chinese, mostly in South America. By that logic, the other one might be an Indian script, since India had the next largest population.
There might have been more, but the surface was cracked beneath where the Spanish text was snapped off, leaving only those four visible.
Scratching my head, I pointed at the lines written in the Latin alphabet. “Out of all of them, this one, the English, is what I can probably make the most sense of, but, y’know...I was never that good at it. I studied hard for my entrance exams, but I haven’t used it in a decade. My vocabulary and grammar are both rusty.”
“So you can’t decipher it then?”
“No. This language, Chinese, should let me get the gist of it. It’s not my language, but both use Chinese characters. It’s an ideographic script, so if I take my time and cross-reference it with the English, I think I can work out a decent translation.”
“Ideo... Uh... Yeah, I didn’t get any of that,” Aisha groaned, clutching her head.
Though she was the nation’s strongest warrior, this sort of academic stuff wasn’t her forte.
“I don’t really get it either,” Liscia admitted.
The common language here used a phonetic alphabet, so the concept of ideograms didn’t exist for them.
I explained briefly, “They’re like pictures that became letters,” before turning to Souji. “If I ask it questions, will it answer?”
“Yeah. If a priest places his hand on the Lunalith and offers a sacred prayer, the goddess of the moon will grant her wisdom...or so the legend says. I couldn’t tell you if it’s true.”
“Your Holiness, that’s not something an archbishop ought to say...” Mary sighed, facepalming.
Even as the head of the church, Souji was as irreverent as ever. He’d be lost without Mary to keep him in line...though I could imagine just how much grief he caused her.
“You’re not thinking ‘you’re one to talk,’ are you?” Liscia said, giving me a sharp look. I wished she’d stop reading my thoughts like it was second nature.
I cleared my throat and tried to move on. “Anyway, mind if I give it a try? Granted, I don’t know the prayer.”
“Sure. We’re the only ones here,” Souji said. “Do as you please.”
“Got it. In that case...” I placed my hand on the tablet and asked the question that mattered most.
“What is the Lunalith? Explain as simply as possible.”
In response to my question, text appeared immediately.
[Record the past and predict the future]
[記錄過去、預測未來]
Ohh, that was easy enough to understand.
“Apparently, it ‘records the past and predicts the future,’” I translated for the others.
“So our priests weren’t exactly using it wrong then,” Souji said, crossing his arms.
It had supposedly predicted Fuuga’s rise and our contact with the Seadians, after all.
“How accurate are those predictions, by the way?” I asked.
[75%] appeared in response.
Hmm... That was kind of iffy. Being wrong one out of four times felt like a lot. In Po**mon terms, that was a bit worse than the chance of getting hit by a one-hit KO attack, but when it landed, it landed hard.
When I explained that, Liscia tilted her head. “Now that you know, will you use it?”
“Well... I don’t want to live at the mercy of a future that might never come true. Maybe I’ll treat it like a horoscope and put about that much faith in it.”
“This seems like an awful lot of security for something like that...”
Yeah, she wasn’t wrong. An imperfect vision of the future sounded like the perfect setup for disaster. If it predicted something dark, I might make it worse just by trying to stop it... It felt too easy to end up like the dark lord from a certain interstellar war.
Honestly, not knowing the future seemed healthier for the mind. So...
“I think I’ll only use it to learn about the past.”
“The past...? Is there something you want to know?” Aisha asked.
I nodded. “Well, I’m curious about my old world...which would count as the past from this world’s perspective.”
One thought that crossed my mind was finally learning how those long-running manga had ended—the great treasure that was all in one piece, or the boss of that black-clad organization. But no... Just hearing the answers wouldn’t be fun. Without the journey, the payoff meant nothing.
As for something I did want to know... Ah.
“Do you think I could ask something a little personal?”
“Hmm? What do you want to know?” Liscia asked.
“I was wondering what happened to my old house...and to Grandpa’s grave.”
Placing my hand on the Lunalith, I spoke clearly. “Show me what became of my home and my grandfather’s grave after I was summoned to this world.”
Text appeared in response to my question.
It wasn’t something that could be answered in a few words, so the passage was long. Translating it accurately would have been difficult, so I focused on the parts I could recognize. Which gave me...
“I see ‘Tatsuya,’ ‘Yoshiaki,’ and...‘Yashiro’ too. Those were the names of my friends back in my old world. And there’s ‘Iikanji,’ that’s the temple where my family grave was. Grandpa and Grandma were buried there too... I see the words ‘perpetual memorial.’ ‘Iikanji Tatsuaki’... I think I had a classmate by that name.”
By piecing together the kanji I understood and filling in the gaps as best I could, I gathered that after I disappeared, my family temple had handled the matter of our house. Two of my old classmates had gone to Iikanji Tatsuaki and arranged for our family grave to be cared for in perpetuity. They’d apparently believed I’d been “spirited away.” Maybe a part of the house had vanished along with me.
Oh... I see. Those two took care of the grave for me.
Before I realized it, tears were running down my cheeks. That faint thread of connection to my past stirred up feelings I couldn’t even name.
✦ ✦ ✦
