Chapter 64: Chapter Sixty-Three: They

After a busy day, falling asleep was not difficult. Even lying on the floor could not stop the brain from quickly adapting to a state of comfort and slipping into dormancy.

The final stage of this process was generally hard for subjective consciousness to detect; when you were drifting in a vague sensation of falling, you had actually missed the best moment to break free.

It was a feeling of losing support; upon careful reflection, the back still pressed against a solid surface, while the motion receptors in the semicircular canals persistently sent signals that the body was moving.

If forced to describe it, it was an abnormal sense of disarray: sensory positioning did not match the self, visually advancing like a moonwalk while physically retreating.

Kraft opened his eyes; the candlelight had already extinguished, replaced by pure darkness.

A faint, unceasing sound came from outside, wave after wave, lapping against the building's outer wall with a rhythmic regularity. Humidity increased in the air; water vapor, following the rhythm of the tide, seeped into the room through unsealed gaps, as if the building had been dragged directly to the seaside.

At some point, a flat, elongated block had been shoved into his hand; a hazy sense of security urged him to bear weight and sleep again.

His prepared consciousness quickly compared the last memory; the next moment, his body silently slid out from under the bed, his hand reaching for his pocket where a flint stone had been prepared in advance.

However, pulled out along with the angular block was a thin, tough card, its raised surface seemingly bearing some familiar font.

The rehearsed sequence was not disrupted by the unexpected clutter. Kraft walked to the brazier in his memory, struck the flint; splintered stone fragments and flickering sparks scattered, expanding rapidly after leaping a few inches, transforming into a streak of firelight.

Cloth strips soaked in fish oil burned fiercely in the brazier; flames leaped, licking the firewood thrown into the basin. Light grew, driving away the darkness from the floor to the rafters.

By now, Kraft finally had the leisure to observe the two objects in his hand that should not have appeared.

On one side was a flat box with a black mirror surface; a small blue-green card on which a human silhouette was barely distinguishable.

The bust on the white background melted and flowed, like baked gelatin, dripping onto the yellow shirt buttoned at the collar, solidifying into small, wax-like patches.

At first glance, it looked like fading of the picture, but a closer look revealed it was originally so: facial features were erased by molten skin-colored patches, losing human form, with threads of adhesion hanging like curtains.

Below were printed several block-style regular script characters, but their strokes and arrangement were scrambled and crooked. From afar, it seemed plausible; with slight attention, one would notice the abnormality of being similar yet different.

As for that flat box, Kraft felt he had not seen it for the first time; similarly similar yet different, once lit, it produced no further reaction.

He placed them on the bed by his pillow, took a torch to ignite it in the brazier, surveyed the room, and casually lit the candlestick. Except for the inexplicably appearing discordant items, he found no discrepancies with his memory.

The positions of the bear traps received special attention; they all stayed where they should be. This made Kraft breathe a sigh of relief; he did not want to step into a trap that had moved on its own while acting according to memory later, breaking his two leg bones into four.

He pulled open the door, ducked under the horizontal locking chain, and walked into the corridor. Looking down, the firelight illuminated not stairs, but a deep black surface of water that swallowed the path to the third floor; beneath the rippling, scale-gleaming surface, familiar areas returned to the unknown.

Fortunately, he had set his position in the attic; otherwise, he should now be diving in the pitch-black waters downstairs. The dazed time right after waking would let water flood into unprepared alveoli, irritate the trachea causing violent coughing, then flood in more water, finally suffocating in the darkness.

Limited diving experience was insufficient to support him in determining direction below; oxygen could not support brain function, the more panicked he became, the greater the consumption, making entering the water a dead end. The staircase, this retreat, was cut off; now the only connection to the outdoors remained the windows on both sides of the attic.

This water level also explained why there was water sound outside; the oscillating tide should be less than two meters below the window sill. Water waves lapped against the rough walls of mixed earth and stone, the gurgling sound of crushing foam bubbles rolling endlessly like the rattling of phlegm in a trachea infected by cocci.

Perhaps humans would never adapt to this body of water; everything here was like a faded door card or a fake electronic device forever stuck on a white startup screen, carrying an innate sense of sickness. It always maintained a general similarity while unintentionally or intentionally leaking differences in minute details.

On streets where water depth reached three stories, satisfying all needs for marine life activity, allowing sharks to swim freely, let alone those things.

Kraft returned to the room, extinguished the torch, and covered the flames with residual ash from the brazier to slightly control the burning. He suddenly realized this counted as a semi-enclosed space; air circulation was poor, the possibility of carbon monoxide poisoning was significantly present, and he could not open windows for ventilation.

Environmental observation ended; hugging his sword, he pulled back under the bed. The only thing left to do was one thing: wait quietly.

The room returned to silence, with only the occasional small crackle of burning charcoal embers and the tireless lapping of water sound merging into the background.

When people are quiet, wandering thoughts always arise; Kraft recalled the few times he had followed his grandfather on hunts.

The Wood family's hunts were naturally different; often, they were not for eating at all, but had to be conducted. The mountains behind were inhabited by large numbers of beasts that had not yet learned to respect these two-legged creatures; when one of them visited too frequently, it had to be culled.

Usually, these tasks were handled by trained young men in the castle, but clumsy youths inevitably botched things; a simple brain was not necessarily smarter than a bear that had lived long. Loud noises were sufficient to scare away small wild beasts, but for seasoned predators, the effect was equivalent to nothing.

At this time, it was Old Wood's turn to step forward, using the opportunity to exercise his muscles, personally leading the team, and hiking into mountains and forests that general hunting would never penetrate.

They walked on a thick layer of decaying fallen leaves; wet, cold tree trunks were covered in moss, while ferns and miasma spread out from the gaps.

In such forests, searching along a general direction often required patience; like confrontation training, it consumed precious time and energy in silence, waiting for the opponent to reveal the flaw destined to appear.

It could be a patch of moss torn off along with the bark, a beast path laid out by fallen fern stems and leaves, or a damp adhering sound breaking the monotonous cycle in the tide.

Old Wood demonstrated to them how to open a bear trap with densely packed teeth, placing it on the road it most liked to pass, fixing the iron chain into a sturdy tree trunk, covering with thin soil, disguising with dead leaves, and lying in ambush nearby.

Next, barring unexpected events, one would clearly feel the approach process of a creature far larger than oneself.

First, one would think it was just the background sound one was used to; ripples arrived as usual, liquid splashed onto high places and fell back to the water surface, no different from what was heard while waiting.

Then, one beat failed to follow; resonance split, eddies rotated, dark currents surged upward, breaking through the upper water layer; the parted seawater slid over the smooth skin, like avoiding something that did not exist.

In terms of hearing, a part of the water sound inexplicably disappeared; a mysterious void appeared beneath the window sill, and the sound vanished.

Dense, gurgling rhythms were replaced by rising melodic tones; high and low voices played together, each with layered echoes echoing back, gentle yet urgent, sung by countless vocal cords, with long cavities providing resonant modification, forming a wave of sound.

Kraft held his breath and focused his mind, crawled out from under the bed, and picked up a jar of fish oil. After returning, he might suffer from concert PTSD for a long time; fortunately, Wenden Port only had a church choir, so at worst, he would just not go to Saint Simon Square to feed seagulls in the future.

The singing rose, and light ignited.

Constant and gentle Bai Guang, breathing in brightness and dimming, gradually strengthening, slowly adjusting to stability; changing from a viscous, rich color toward a near-pale, clear natural light, exceptionally bright.

A few strands of Bai Guang leaking through the wooden cracks stuck to the wall, unexpectedly overpowering the warm tones of the brazier lighting, announcing its arrival.

The musical sound rose again, penetrating even further, masking the sharp sound of teeth on fleshy tentacles gripping stone cracks. Wet, heavy limbs alternately extended; internal joints bent and twisted, muscles contracted; the main body rose from the water, a film of water sliding down like a waterfall, the dense sound of water droplets like a sudden rainstorm.

Finally, all sounds stopped outside the window; the stable, tempting white light shone into the room through the window gaps, giving an immediate desire to open it.

Through a layer of window board, it waited for the ignorant prey to open the window and welcome it itself.

It felt like an anglerfish; this trick of glowing was simple but unexpectedly effective. Few people could refuse such a comforting, beautiful light source when suddenly awakened at midnight, but unfortunately, there was one right here.

Weighing the oil jar in his hand, Kraft moved two steps to the side, dodging the direct Bai Guang. He had felt more than once that this light was infinitely close to the most perfect moonlight he could imagine, bright and clear, to the point of involuntarily generating uncontrollable affection.

This certainly was not just simple light; it was mixed with a special attraction mechanism effective on humans, the same principle as anglerfish using the phototaxis of deep-sea creatures.

From a certain perspective, this could be good news; creatures that hunted this way all had more or less motion defects: either not fast enough, not agile enough, or simply unable to move.

The human motion system was ultimately human; it did not consider normally bearing loads several times body weight, and no matter how optimized, limits existed. Thinking in reverse, perhaps it did not originally live in water, but adopting this motion system meant it could only stay in water most of the time to reduce stress?

His guess was likely correct; the angle of the Bai Guang tilted slightly; the thing outside could not even stably cling to the wall for a long time, and its posture had to be adjusted. This gave him considerable confidence.

However, the first change did not happen on the side of the silent confrontation; keen hearing detected the tide sound suddenly stopping outside the window on the other side behind him, and the damp, viscous adhering sound he had just tasted rose again.

【Its scientific name probably needs to be in the plural form】