Chapter 386 — Gao Song's Wartime Preparations

Rebecca was the sole remaining heir of the Cecil family. She was skilled in neither administration nor military affairs, yet Hetty's traditional aristocratic thinking still made her feel that Rebecca ought to be involved in these matters.

Gao Yang gave Hetty a long, deep look: "Let Rebecca rest well, and go to the Magical Technology Research Institute tomorrow as usual. Keep working on the vehicle chassis, or the printing machine. What she is doing is just as important as preparing for a war."

Then he added: "Hetty, times have changed. A person's duties should be determined by ability, not by bloodline."

Having said that, Gao Yang left the lord's manor together with Amber.

...

In the Shadow Testing Grounds, Suo Jilin and the soldiers were keeping watch around the pool, while the siren Tyr still maintained her terrifying and invigorating "sea demon" form, holding Clement in check with a mass of tentacles.

In truth, even if she had not bound the unfortunate man with tentacles, he would have had almost no strength left to resist or flee.

The power of four explosive shots was no joke. Once the forced life-sustaining effects of the spiny-skin art and life transference had worn off, the crushing weakness had nearly finished Clement outright; had Tyr not noticed in time that her "prey" was slowly dying, he would by now have been a corpse.

"I'm telling you, don't you dare die," Tyr said, repeatedly slapping Clement's face with a tentacle to bring the dazed enemy back to consciousness again and again, her voice full of worry. "If you die in my hands, I'll never get my hands on any of those 'little biscuits' Gao Yang keeps in his collection..."

Clearly, the siren had still not given up on the idea of getting her tentacles on that "God of Nature" corpse in Gao Yang's possession...

Suo Jilin watched with a strange expression as Tyr kept the prisoner's life hanging by a thread with precisely calibrated healing spells and carried on an interaction with him that could only be called bizarre. At last he could not help asking: "Don't you really think that form of yours is enough to frighten a man to death on its own?"

Tyr looked down at her scaled upper torso and her hideous, grotesque lower body of tentacles, utterly baffled: "Not really. All my sisters back home can do this..."

Suo Jilin muttered helplessly: "...What kind of aesthetic do you sirens have, anyway..."

"Whoever can take the most forms is the prettiest," Tyr answered, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. "Everyone can shapeshift anyway. Ordinary looks are just whatever grows..."

It was into this thoroughly bizarre atmosphere that Gao Yang arrived.

The instant he entered the Shadow Testing Grounds, he saw Tyr, enormous and grotesque, occupying the whole pool, and her great mass of writhing tentacles, more octopus than any octopus.

His first reaction was to wonder whether he ought to make a sanity check...

"You'd best not stare at her tentacles," Amber, trailing behind Gao Yang, spoke up in warning. "The patterned ones are downright sinister—look at them for even a moment and your mind gets hijacked on the spot. Next thing you know, you've turned into a relentlessly upbeat, cheerful, energetic person, and it lasts at least two hours..."

Gao Yang: "???"

What kind of nonsense was this!