Chapter 1270 — Shadows Beneath the Deep
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 5
The siren called Coroline did not answer her companion's grumbling; she only bowed her head and gazed at the scene deep within that heavy layer of seawater. As a water elemental, her sight could pierce the dark, deep waters and see very, very far—and in her vision those pale blue streams of light running through the depths of the Boundless Sea did indeed resemble some lovely "currents." She stared at them for a dozen seconds or so, then suddenly raised her head and said: "Tell me—what in the world is this thing, anyway? Looks like water but isn't water, wells up out of the seabed from nowhere, flows off to some place nobody knows, and the Queen herself is so strict about us watching it, says report anything at the first sign of change... What is it, really?"
"Didn't you hear Archwitch Hathaway? This thing is called the 'Deep Blue Network,' it's the power system of this planet, something like ocean currents or atmospheric circulation—except what flows through it is magical power, and unlike currents and atmospheric circulation, which can only manifest in the material world, it can flow through all the 'realms' of the entire planet, circulating like a net through the material world, the Shadow Realm, the Gloom Realm, and the like..."
This sea-blue-haired siren seemed a learned sort—at least she had paid attention to the scholars' teachings. Her companion Coroline, however, was plainly not the attentive-student type; she had heard only half of it when she began bobbing her head with an expression of "I understand everything perfectly," muttering: "Power system, eh? Ocean currents, eh? Then I think I've got it..."
As she spoke she lowered her eyes to the blue streams deep in the seawater, and an expression of mischief-seeking crept over her face: "So tell me—if I dive straight down, where would I end up?"
"You didn't understand a word!" The blue-haired siren went pale with alarm. "This thing isn't water, I'm telling you—you dive down there and you might just die inside it! We've barely managed to keep the truce with the local water elementals all these years—if you die in there and we can't explain it properly, what if we end up at war again..."
The siren sentry was clearly terrified by her companion's singular line of thinking; in an instant she rattled off a whole string of words at breakneck speed to dissuade this sister of hers whose capacity for action had always been formidable. The siren named Coroline listened with half an ear, and in the end finally abandoned her highly creative notion—yet her gaze could not help but linger on those blue streams running through the Boundless Sea, her heart itching for mischief, and she muttered: "Then tell me... is there anything that can travel through these 'rivers'? Since they're a kind of 'network,' after all..."
"You're asking me? Search me... Maybe Archwitch Hathaway or the Queen would know?" The blue-haired siren thought it over, her tail tip flicking rapidly through the air. "When all's said and done, it's only recently that we've been able to sense and understand the 'magical power' of this planet—even the Archwitch only half grasps it. All our knowledge of magical power and the 'Deep Blue Network' comes from exchanges with our land allies—and the racial gap between land allies and sirens is so vast..."
"Right," Coroline coiled her trident with her tail and tapped her fists together with a look of "I've got it again." "Land allies and us differ so much in life form—they'd drop dead jumping into the Deep Blue Network, but with a siren that's not necessarily so, so it's roughly equivalent to me still being able to take a dive straight in..."
Before she finished speaking, the blue-haired siren beside her had coiled her tail directly around Coroline's, and the two long serpent tails instantly knotted into a dead tangle.