Chapter 874 — The Sirens' Endeavor

"I think we ought to install an optical filter over every observation area on the Antavien," the blue-haired witch Hathaway said, reaching out and gesturing between sky and earth as she spoke to her assistant. "Make this tilted view 'straight' again. The scenery as it is now always makes one feel dizzy."

"...I think the main reason you feel dizzy is that you drank too much 'Deep-Sea Special,'" the assistant said, flicking Hathaway's paw away from the air with her tail. "That was almost twice our share."

"I need to stimulate my mind, to maintain a high-speed capacity for thought," Hathaway said, tapping the alloy floor nearby with the tip of her tail, producing a tok-tok sound. "All the recent research projects are so exciting—I don't want to stop for a single moment..."

The assistant glanced at this deep-sea witch—so respected, yet so riddled with flaws in the practical affairs of life—and shook her head helplessly. "'Stimulate the mind' is a human expression, Master—where would we even get a brain?"

Hathaway looked at her utterly serious assistant and shook her head. "How dull."

Then this deep-sea witch, a survivor of the "Great Crash" and a contemporary of the Queen, slid her long serpentine tail toward the antenna array nearby.

The massive ancient device stood solemnly, its streamlined casing covering a superalloy framework and concealing the complex structures within. Its tip pointed toward the distant blue sky, and a highly sensitive sensing array kept constant watch for any signal that might come from every direction.

It had once been designed for interstellar superluminal communication, for contacting the other colony ships that had fled the homeworld.

Yet today only the Antavien had crashed alone on this planet; the kin who had fled alongside it had long since vanished deep in the turbulence of space-time. The advanced and powerful superluminal communication array had also failed on this world of anomalous environment, and only the most basic sensing apparatus could still barely function—not only could it no longer receive signals from space, but even maintaining communication within the atmosphere required all manner of auxiliary enhancements.

Hathaway's gaze traveled upward along the casing of the antenna array. About a hundred meters up, she saw that part of the casing had been opened, and the deepwater technicians were busy there, boldly overhauling the ancient structures within. Faintly glowing runic devices were being installed one by one into the original framework, and many additional cables and drag chains extended from the "inspection ports."

"Our human allies have generously shared a great deal with us..." the deep-sea witch said softly. "We once assumed that all technology on land was utterly backward, but the facts prove that even on backward land, the locals' wisdom has something worth taking..."

The assistant's voice came from beside her: "Master, do you really think this modification will work? After all, we've tried all sorts of methods to modify other things before..."

"A year ago, the sirens were still utterly incapable of understanding or perceiving what this world's 'magic' was. It was something outside our worldview, even something our physiological structure could not 'compatible' with—the result of a clash of rules," Hathaway said in a low, slow, and solemn voice. At this moment she was already that deep-sea witch worthy of every siren's respect, and her words made every siren around her unconsciously show expressions of thought and approval. "Many years ago I prophesied that if the rules of this world deviated from those of the homeworld by even one ten-thousandth more, we would have been reduced to dust the instant we entered this space-time. Fortunately, we did not encounter that additional one ten-thousandth of deviation, and we survived—but that survival is incomplete.

"Our capacity for perception and thought is confined within our own life form. In this world, we are like a defective species born unable to understand addition and subtraction; we are born unable to perceive and comprehend a portion of this world's structure. So no matter how hard we try, we cannot repair the ship—instead, we are knocked down and forced to start over again and again by this world's arcane tides.

"We cannot repair the antenna, not because we lack wisdom or skill, but because we are 'blind' and 'deaf' before certain information.

"But that defect has now been made whole.

"We can perceive magic, and we can understand what magic is. Human runes are no longer a jumble of chaotic symbols to us, and the tremors of energy in the air are no longer incomprehensible noise. On this foundation, every repair we make to the ship from now on will no longer be the random hammering and fumbling of the past.

"We have already succeeded in restoring a small portion of the Core Fusion Tower to normal operation. Antavien's energy supply rate now stands at thirty-six percent—an unremarkable number, perhaps, but enough to prove that we have indeed taken a step forward.

"Sisters, all our efforts now are meaningful—so let us begin with repairing the main antenna."