South Sea, Adventure II
Following the battle, Riella returned to her room. The siren had woken her up, and she wanted to go back to bed.
“Damn it...”
However, she couldn’t fall asleep. This wasn’t because of temperature or humidity, but her own state of mind.
Whenever she closed her eyes, she remembered the battle that had just unfolded before her.
The grotesque Mock, a much less dangerous monster than the object of their hunt, had completely cornered them.
The scene filled her with an unpleasant mix of fear, rage, and panic.
Perhaps she wouldn’t have felt as frustrated if she’d defeated the Mock herself, but it had been taken out by that battleship instead—and it had taken so little effort too.
That was what stuck in her heart like a thorn.
“Gotta go wash...” Feeling an unpleasant dampness from the sweat on her hair and back, Riella got up out of bed and headed for the bath.
“Oh. I went fur another dip. Hope you didn’t mind.”
And right as she arrived, she bumped into Shu as he was leaving.
The natural assumption would have been that he’d take his costume off to bathe, but the inexplicable steam coming off its head would suggest otherwise. Combined with the towel neatly placed on the neck, he looked like the cute mascot of some quaint hot springs town.
“You again?” she asked.
“I got a beary strong urge to wash off some sweat,” he replied as he pretended to dry himself off with the towel. It was a charming little gesture, but in Riella’s current mood, it only got on her nerves.
“That so?”
“Anyway, I’m gonna go back and hibernate fur a while. Night night,” he said, waving casually as he walked back to his cabin.
But as he passed her by, his scent wafted toward her nose.
It wasn’t the smell of sweat, but of the sea. It was as though he’d recently jumped into the salty water and not even the bath had fully washed it away.
With a noise of annoyance, Riella turned back to face Shu, but he was no longer in sight.
“Goddamn...him...” Riella repeated the words she’d muttered to herself while leaving the bridge.
Clearly, the reason Shu had taken another bath and still smelled like the sea was that he’d jumped into the water yet again to defeat another monster.
Riella had immediately realized that the battleship, which vanished like an illusion after the battle, had belonged to Shu. It was the spare... No, the main ship that he’d mentioned, and perhaps it was even his Embryo.
He’d used that ship to save Riella yet again. To assist with her current predicament. To help her move past a foe she was powerless to defeat on her own.
“Damn it!” The feeling that flooded her heart wasn’t fear, anger, or panic, but a bitterness that encompassed all of these feelings. She was bitter about her weakness as fleet commander and about Shu, who had saved her so effortlessly two times in one day.
This feeling settled over her like a layer of grime that not even a second shower could wash away.
✦ ✦ ✦
Despite what he’d said to Riella, Shu didn’t go straight to bed.
Upon arriving at his cabin, he sat down on the chair that was fixed to the floor.
“All right, then...” With that, he took something out of his Inventory and placed it on the desk in front of him. “Let’s see if there was any point in that dive.”
Just as Riella had suspected, he’d just fought yet another battle.
What she didn’t know, though, was that, upon defeating the Abyss Mail Kraken, he’d gone out of his way to dive into the sea and retrieve the object he’d just taken out. It was a milky-white pearl—clearly the remains of the Frost High Serpent.
However, the very fact that it left something like this was notable.
In silence, Shu reached into his Inventory to take out and equip a monocle. This was an accessory with a high-level Identification skill on it, which he used on the pearl.
However, it showed absolutely nothing.
“So it’s not an item.” Not only was the pearl not an item, but the system still recognized it as a piece of a living being.
However, it wasn’t alive; Shu had also used Reveal to confirm this. It showed no debuffs or anything like that—the serpent was completely dead.
That would mean this pearl was a piece of the creature’s lifeless corpse, something that shouldn’t be possible.
“Why isn’t it turnin’ into bits of light?” Shu wondered.
In Infinite Dendrogram, monsters never left behind their corpses. When they died, they dropped thematically appropriate items and dissolved into light.
There were several theories about why monsters functioned like this, but the most prominent of them was the “theory of circulation” developed by tians.
This theory stated that some of the energy the monster had died with—its Resources, in other words—were transformed into items and XP for the slayer, but the majority of its energy was returned to the system so it could be circulated back into the world. The closest thing to a corpse that monsters ever left behind were items representing body parts like fangs, claws, and hides. In rare cases they would leave behind an item called Complete Remains, but the theory postulated that this only happened after a portion of the dead monster’s Resources had already left it. Masters were receptive to this idea, with some saying that it worked perfectly fine as the in-setting explanation for loot and XP, while others pointed out its similarity to the theory of relativity.
The core of this theory was the idea that even if a portion of the monster was transformed into items and XP, the majority of it always returned to the system.
However, this hadn’t happened to the serpent that had died by pearlification. If the theory of circulation was correct, then any monster that avoided becoming motes of light would have left behind a corpse overflowing with Resources.
“A body full of energy...”
And that chimera had consumed it. That made it easy to guess that the kraken had gone after the serpent and turned it into pearl specifically to feed on it.
“And there’s that breath too...” The chimera had attacked the Adventure II with a breath just like the one used by the Frost High Serpent. Had it had that skill from the start and simply hadn’t used it because its opponent was resistant to cold? Or had the chimera acquired it during the battle?
“Just like Sechs...” Shu’s intuition told him that it was the latter, for he knew someone who could do just that. “Chimeras that turn other creatures into pearl, then eat them and take their skills... How many of them are there, anyway?”
Granvaloa theorized that these Abyss chimeras had been created in some undiscovered ruins. This made it possible that the Abyss Mail Kraken wasn’t the only specimen with this power.
Even Abyss Shellder—the supposed success—might have possessed it too.
“Did Granvaloa not know about this whole eating thing because there aren’t many specimens with that power, so they just happened to never see one?” Or were the ruins where the chimeras originated still producing them—and ones that were steadily getting more powerful?
If that were the case, then things would only get worse until the source was found and destroyed.
“Are we sure that’s what’s really going on, though?” Shu was slowly beginning to doubt that these chimeras originated from some ruins in the first place. He wasn’t even sure why he had started suspecting this, but it felt as though he was failing to put something together from the information he’d been given.
Simply thinking about it wasn’t bringing him closer to an answer, and he was quite fatigued from his days of being lost at sea, not to mention the two battles he’d fought just today. Finally, he chose to get some sleep instead of staying up pondering.
Thus ended the first day of Shu’s involvement in the South Sea Incident.