Klein left this world peacefully.
At least, that’s how he felt at that moment.
It was the first time Ophelia had been so proactive—so proactive that the string in his brain responsible for self-preservation forgot to ring. As he was pressed into the pillow, he even had a small spare bit of consciousness to wonder: Does this count as dying in the line of duty?
But everything has a price.
When the morning sun shone through the gap in the curtains the next day, Klein tried to roll over.
Then he stopped moving.
He froze right there, his posture stuck halfway through a side-roll. The expression on his face shifted from drowsiness to blankness, and then slowly transitioned from blankness to an unspeakable agony.
His pelvis.
His pelvis was staging a protest.
It wasn't a vague ache; it was a tooth-aching creak between the joints with every single movement—perhaps half of that sensation was his imagination, but the pain was definitely not.
Klein spent about thirty seconds very slowly, inch by inch, adjusting himself back to a flat-lying position.
The ceiling. The ceiling again.
He had spent a long time staring at the ceiling last night.
...No, later on, he hadn't looked at the ceiling much. What he saw later was far more exciting than any ceiling.
Klein closed his eyes for a moment, pushing the fragments of inappropriate images back into his mind frame by frame—he didn't push very fast, unsure if he couldn't move them or just didn't want to—then he opened his eyes to deal with the problem at hand.
He moved his legs. The dull pain coming from the pelvic region was clear and honest.
The honorary knight of the Empire, the Ophelia who had slain countless sea monsters on the battlefield, did not suffer any decrease in combat effectiveness just because the setting had changed.
Klein did a rough mechanical estimation—her weight, the surface area of her straddle, plus that... difficult-to-describe frequency and amplitude—but he gave up halfway through the calculation because the resulting numbers made the pain in his pelvis instantly double.
The combination of physical pain and psychological pain was highly effective.
“Ophelia.”
No one was beside him.
There were still indentations on the pillow where someone had lain, and the blanket was folded with an almost obsessive neatness—folded in a way that seemed to intentionally erase every shred of evidence of what had happened on this bed last night.
She was already up.
Klein called out again.
The sound of footsteps came from down the hallway, quickly.
When the door pushed open, Ophelia had already changed into her daily clothes. Her hair was tied back neatly, and her collar was buttoned to the very top—a world apart from how she looked last night, with her hair spread across the pillow and her nightgown missing several buttons.
She stood at the doorway, her expression as calm as ever.
However, Klein noticed that her gaze was off—it lingered on his face for less than a second before drifting away, toward the bedside table, the curtains, and the landscape painting on the wall that no one ever noticed. In short, it drifted everywhere except toward him.
She didn't dare look at him.
“What is it?” Her voice was steadier than usual, steady like she was deliberately controlling it.
“I need you to do me a favor,” Klein said, keeping his tone as casual as possible. “In the laboratory, on the second shelf of the third row, there are a few bottles with blue stoppers. Bring me two of them.”
“Healing potions?”
“Yes.”
Ophelia’s gaze finally shifted over, glancing at him.
Just a glance.
But that glance swept precisely from his face down to the pelvic region covered by the blanket before quickly snapping back. With her perception, the amount of information contained in that glance was probably enough for her to complete a full injury assessment.
“Where are you hurt?”
She asked anyway. She asked even though she knew the answer. Klein wasn't sure if this was a knightly habit or something else—perhaps she hoped he would give a reason unrelated to her, like “I stepped wrong getting out of bed.”
Klein fell silent for a second.
“...The pelvic region.”
Ophelia’s expression didn't change.
But Klein saw the fingers of her left hand tighten—not much, just once. The scales with their dark luster on her knuckles flickered slightly in the morning light before loosening again.
The speed at which she turned to leave was noticeably faster than when she had entered.
More than just a notch faster.
The sound of footsteps receded down the hallway, turned a corner, and vanished. There was no hesitation or deceleration—the marching pace of an honorary knight of the Empire, crisp and resolute.
But that wasn't haste.
That was a retreat.
Klein stared at the ceiling and sighed.
The great Knightess who had slain countless sea monsters on the battlefield was currently performing a strategic relocation at double-time away from a pelvic-injured alchemist.
The footsteps returned quickly. The faint clinking of potion vials could be heard from the end of the hallway—the two glass bottles were making subtle clicking sounds in her palm, the frequency unsteady, indicating that the hand holding them wasn't as steady as usual.
The door was pushed open.
Ophelia walked to the bedside and handed over the two blue-stoppered potions.
She used her right hand.
Her face was turned toward the window, and her left forearm was held up beside her face, the movement too deliberate—by her usual standards, this was practically a massive opening. One of the strongest knights of the Empire, a woman who wouldn't give an enemy a second glance on the battlefield, was currently using her own arm as a mask.
Klein took the potion vials.
When his fingertips touched hers, she flinched.
Her hand retracted faster than she could draw a sword.
He pulled out the stopper and tilted his head back to gulp some down. The potion was cool, with a herbal bitterness that slid down his throat. The dull pain in his pelvis receded slightly like a falling tide—not completely gone, but downgraded from “completely unable to move” to “won't die if I move.”
“Thanks.”
“Mhm.”
A single syllable.
Her voice was muffled, whether because her arm was blocking her mouth or for some other reason. Perhaps both.
She still didn't turn around. But from this angle, Klein could see her ear.
It was red from the lobe to the tip, a very even flush that was even more pronounced than last night—at least last night it was in the dark with only half-moonlight; now it was broad daylight, with the morning sun illuminating it clearly, leaving nowhere to hide.
Klein opened his mouth, but the words “Your ears are red again” rolled around on his tongue before he swallowed them back down.
His pelvis reminded him that he had already prepaid the price for his loose tongue last night. The interest was outrageously high. He could barely afford the principal anymore.
“Why are you just standing there?” Klein changed the subject. “Sit.”
Ophelia’s back stiffened.
“No need.”
“...You don't think the word ‘sit’ is some kind of suggestion, do you?”
No answer.
But the fingers of her left hand hanging at her side tightened again.
The scales stood up slightly in her embarrassment.
Klein wisely shut his mouth.
After finishing the second healing potion, Klein placed the empty bottle on the bedside table and tentatively moved his waist.
The dull pain in his pelvic region had mostly receded, leaving only a residual ache lingering deep inside that refused to leave, like a bruise that only shows up three days after a beating—not fatal, but constantly reminding you of its presence.
He told Ophelia to go down and eat first.
He needed to lie down for a little longer.
Ophelia practically fled.
After a long while, Klein slowly sat up.
His pelvis wasn't shattered.
He thanked his own solid alchemy skills; one bottle for periosteum repair, two bottles for freedom of movement. He also thanked Ophelia for being—how should he put it—restrained last night.
Klein reflected on whether the word “restrained” was accurate. He concluded that if that was restraint, then without it, he would currently be asking Raymond to contact a carpenter to make a wheelchair. A dark red oak one, with carvings on the armrests and some embroidery on the back—he might as well keep it dignified.
He stood up and took a few steps.
He was fine. He could walk.
Klein accepted the fact that he had survived this ordeal with a expressionless face and began to dress.
When he went downstairs, he deliberately made sure his gait showed no openings. Every stride, the force of each footfall, and the shift of his center of gravity were controlled perfectly—if someone were observing from the side, they would at most think he was walking slightly more cautiously than usual, but they would never see any real problem.
This was a matter of dignity.
In the dining room, Ophelia was already sitting in her spot. Before her sat the breakfast Raymond had arranged—toasted bread, fried eggs, a small dish of pickled olives, and half a pot of black tea. Her knife and fork hadn't moved, and the tea was untouched.
She sat bolt upright, staring straight ahead, like she was in a lineup waiting for inspection.
Klein walked over and sat down. As he pulled out his chair, a faint, imperceptible twinge of pain shot through his waist, but he didn't even twitch an eyebrow.
“Waiting for me?”
“No. I just sat down.”
She was lying. The ring of condensation on the outside of the teapot showed that it had been sitting there for at least a while. Furthermore, the steam around the lid had almost completely dissipated; in another moment, the tea would have gone from “warm” to “cold.”
Klein didn't call her out. He picked up a piece of bread and took a bite.
The two of them ate in silence for a while.
A silence that was a bit unnatural. The sound of cutlery hitting the plates was exceptionally clear, and even their chewing seemed to echo.
Klein wanted to say something to break the atmosphere, but looking at Ophelia’s intense focus on cutting her fried egg—the precision of her blade was abnormally high, the distance between each cut almost identical, a level of precision that only appears when one is deliberately focusing their attention on the plate to keep it from drifting elsewhere—he decided it was better to keep quiet.
A silent breakfast. A post-battle breakfast.
When Raymond pushed the door open to refill the tea, that was roughly the atmosphere in the dining room.
He walked in with a freshly brewed teapot, his gait steady as ever, his leather shoes making precise, evenly spaced sounds on the wooden floor. His gaze lingered on Klein’s face for less than half a second.
In that half-second, he showed no expression. His eyebrows didn't move, his mouth didn't twitch, and he didn't even blink extra.
But Klein could just feel that this man had already guessed eighty or ninety percent of everything. Maybe more. Maybe all of it.
After all, for a man who had watched him grow up, reading what had happened last night from his complexion and a pot of cold tea was probably about as difficult as reading a menu.
Raymond walked to the table, removed the old teapot, and replaced it with the new one. His movements were fluid, making no unnecessary sound.
As he refilled the tea, his hand passed by Klein’s cup. Klein noticed that the angle he poured from was an inch higher than usual—it might have been an illusion—but the sound of the tea hitting the cup was exceptionally crisp, like some kind of silent commentary.
“Master, regarding today’s arrangements—”
“Business as usual. After eating, I’ll head upstairs to finish up.”
“Understood.” Raymond bowed slightly, set the teapot down, and turned to leave.
At the door, his footsteps paused.
He turned back.
“Master, Miss Lyra asked me to convey her message. She wishes to know when you might be available, as she has some matters she would like to consult you on.”
Klein’s chewing slowed for a moment.
“This afternoon would be fine.”
“Very well.”
Raymond acknowledged, his gaze level and his back straight.
Then he left.
Before the door closed, Klein heard an extremely faint—he wasn't sure—perhaps a cough, or something else, from the hallway. In any case, it didn't sound like the kind of cough one makes when their throat is actually uncomfortable.
“...Thank you for your hard work, Raymond,” Klein said to the closed door.
Silence lasted for a second outside.
“It is my duty.” The voice came from the other side of the door, steady as always.
The footsteps receded.
Klein silently finished chewing his bread and took a sip of tea. It was good tea, brewed by Raymond, with the strength just right and the bitterness perfectly suppressed by the sweet aftertaste.
It was on a completely different level than the pot of bitter juice Martha had served last night.
Opposite him, Ophelia was still cutting her fried egg.
That egg had already been cut into twelve pieces of almost identical size, arranged as neatly as a geometry assignment. Given her appetite and eating speed, the egg should have been finished long ago, but it was still being cut—because once she stopped her cutlery, she would have to find something else to do, and at this table, there was nothing else for her attention to land on besides the bread, the teacup, the pickled olives, and Klein.
The first three wouldn't take this long.
Klein watched her for two seconds, said nothing, withdrew his gaze, and continued his breakfast.
After finishing, the two of them didn't say a word, tacitly heading up to the third floor together.
They walked up the same flight of stairs, separated by about three steps. Ophelia walked in front, her pace half a beat faster than usual. Klein followed behind, his pace half a beat slower than usual—not because of his pelvis; the potion had already taken effect. It was just safer to walk a bit slower.
The laboratory door pushed open. The blueprints they had laid out before leaving yesterday were still in place, and the sealing model on the table hadn't been moved.
Klein sat down at the workbench and spread out the remaining two node parameters diagrams.
His mind was very clear. Although using the word “rest” for last night was somewhat inaccurate—setting that aside, the actual effect was quite good. His train of thought, which had been tense for three days, felt like tea leaves soaking in hot water, relaxing significantly. The logic chains that he couldn't straighten out no matter how he tried now seemed much clearer.
He had already grasped the rough framework of the seal’s core logic over the previous three days.
The method the Sage used wasn't complex; it could even be called simple—no fancy multi-layered nesting, no redundant meditation circuits. It was just basic conceptual anchoring. To use an analogy: if the siren was a fire, the Sage didn't pour water to extinguish it; instead, he extracted the heat of the flame itself to forge an iron cage—the stronger the fire, the sturdier the cage. Her own power was the cage that imprisoned her.
Concise. Beautiful. Turning the enemy’s own weapon against them.
But simple didn't mean easy. On the contrary, the simpler the structure, the higher the requirement for precision. It was like a steel cable with only a single strand—it could bear the weight, but if it snapped, everything would be lost. The parameters of the final two nodes involved the resonance frequency between the seal and the sealed entity; a single decimal point off, and the entire seal would either silently fail or overload and collapse.
Klein picked up his pen and began his deductions.
Ophelia pulled a chair over and sat by the window.
She didn't make a sound to disturb him—she had been very good at that from day one. Over the past three days, every time he entered his zone at the workbench, she would automatically switch to silent mode, her presence minimized but never truly gone. Like a sword resting on a rack, she stayed there quietly, but you knew she could be drawn at any moment.
She laid her sword across her knees, her right hand resting on the scabbard, as she looked out the window.
Sunlight shone through the window, falling on her shoulder and half of her face. Her tied-back golden hair was bound in a crisp ponytail. Her neck was clean; the red flush that had crept up from her collarbone last night had completely receded—a knight’s constitution recovered faster than anything.
Klein saw all this in his peripheral vision and then turned his focus back to the blueprints.
He wrote for about an hour and a half. He changed ink three times and went through five sheets of scrap paper. The first node parameter was locked in by the fortieth minute; he verified it twice using proof by contradiction and confirmed it was correct.
Midway through the deduction, a glass of water appeared at his hand.
Klein didn't look up; his left hand reached out, picked it up, and took a sip. It was cold water at just the right temperature—it had been sitting for a short while, not freshly drawn. She had observed his habits.
He set the glass down, his gaze never leaving the blueprints as his lips moved: “Thanks.”
There was no response. The chair creaked slightly as she sat back down.
The second parameter took even longer. It wasn't because of a large volume of calculations, but because it involved a conceptual gray area—the Sage had used an unconventional symbolic notation at this point, which didn't belong to any current common alchemical notation system, nor did it seem like a remnant of any known classical school. It sat alone in the middle of the formula like a private footnote that only the Sage himself could understand.
Klein stared at that symbol for a long time, flipping through two notebooks.
He tried to derive its meaning from context, but the logic of the parameters before and after broke at this node—it wasn't a contradiction, but a missing piece. It felt like reading an article and suddenly encountering a word you didn't know, where the meaning of the entire sentence happened to hinge on that one word.
In the end, the shell of the seal saved him.
The Sage had carved many marks on the outer wall of the cubic cage. Most were functional runic circuits, but several corners contained non-functional annotations—like rough drafts of thoughts the Sage had recorded while performing the technique. Klein found two other occurrences of the same symbol in those drafts; after cross-referencing the surrounding context, the meaning was finally nailed down.
The pen tip touched the blueprint, and the final number was written.
He set down the pen, leaned back against the chair, and let out a long breath.
A faint soreness shot through his waist the moment it hit the back of the chair. It wasn't a phantom pain anymore; his muscles were genuinely tired—three days at the desk plus last night’s extra exercise meant his waist probably wanted to submit a resignation letter.
“Done.”
Ophelia turned her head.
She had been sitting by the window, her posture almost unchanged. The angle of the sunlight had shifted from the slanting rays of the morning to the near-direct light of noon, meaning she had been in that chair for at least an hour and a half, only getting up once—the time she brought him water.
Klein flattened the blueprints in front of him and pointed to the final parameter list. “The Sage’s seal, from principle to execution, the entire logic chain has been sorted out. Twelve nodes; the function, parameters, and the connection with adjacent nodes for every single one have been confirmed.”
“Can it be used for research now?”
“More than that.”
Klein turned his chair to face her, tapping his finger on the edge of the table. “Now that the sealing principles are clear, the next step is reverse engineering—how to extract information from the gaps in the seal without releasing her.”
He made a gesture: “You can think of the seal as a sealed glass bottle with the siren inside. What I need to do now isn't to open the cap—opening it would be the end of us—but to poke a small hole in the bottle wall just large enough to stick a needle through and extract a tiny sample.”
“The conceptual fragments of the will of the deep sea carried by the siren are the entry point to solving the entire puzzle.” Klein folded the blueprints. “The amount of information contained in those fragments is more than all existing literature combined—provided they can be extracted safely.”
Ophelia nodded, her gaze falling on his folded blueprints. “And the risks?”
“There are some. But they're controllable.” Klein put the blueprints in a drawer and locked it with a key. “We’ll wait until the materials arrive. Thinking about it now is just idle speculation.”
He stretched his neck, his cervical vertebrae making a series of small clicking sounds. Three days of accumulated fatigue truly required a proper rest.
“But that’s enough for today.”
He turned to look at Ophelia.
She had already stood up and walked to the rack by the wall to hang her sword. The sunlight shone from behind her, outlining her entire silhouette with a layer of pale gold. Her movements were routine and natural: her left hand supported the bottom of the scabbard, her right hand held the guard, and she set it onto the two hooks on the rack.
However, after hanging the sword, she stood there for a second. Her gaze fell on the old scratch on the scabbard, and her right thumb unconsciously brushed against the seam of her trousers.
Klein stared at that movement for a moment.
“There’s still time tonight,” he said, his tone casual. “I want to write a letter to the Silver Scale Chamber of Commerce and list out some materials. The subsequent experiments will need some things that are a bit hard to come by.”
“What do you need me to do?”
“Help me check if anything is missing from the list. You’re more familiar with actual materials related to sea monsters than I am—from elemental attributes to the preservation conditions for conceptual residues. You’ve seen and used those things; you’re more accurate than what’s written in books.”
Ophelia gave a sound of acknowledgment.
She walked toward the door. As she passed by him, her step slowed for half a beat.
That half-beat wasn't hesitation or a pause—it was more like an extremely brief interval in her footfalls that wasn't in her original rhythm. An interval that wouldn't appear in normal walking.
Klein looked up at her.
She didn't look at him, walking straight past. Her eyes were fixed straight ahead, her expression as calm as ever, her back straight, and her pace returned to its normal frequency and stride—as if nothing had happened.
But that half-beat pause lingered in the air.
Not too much, not too little, just enough for him to notice.
Klein withdrew his gaze and neatly arranged the last few things on the table.
When he stood up, a faint soreness once again rippled through his waist—it wasn't a phantom pain. It was just his muscles reminding him that they remembered last night.
Klein rubbed his waist and started walking without changing his expression.
When he walked out the laboratory door, he saw her waiting for him in the hallway.
Ophelia stood with her back to him, her right hand resting on the windowsill of the hallway, facing outside. The sunlight from above fell on her golden ponytail in a layer of shattered light. She didn't turn around, nor did she hurry him. She just stood there, waiting.
The distance was about three steps. Just like when they had come up.
Klein walked over. The two of them walked toward the stairs, one after the other.
The distance between them narrowed from three steps to two. It was unclear who had adjusted first—perhaps he had walked half a beat faster, or perhaps she had walked half a beat slower.
Perhaps it was both.
Rate on N.U.
