Chapter 208 — The Siren's Knowledge

At Amber's reminder, Gao Yang grew curious as well. He turned to Betty beside him. "Didn't you call Tir over for dinner?"

Betty blinked. "I did, but Miss Tir said she wanted to sleep a little longer…"

"With her near-hibernation schedule, a little longer could mean she wakes up at tomorrow's mealtime," Gao Yang's mouth twitched despite himself. He had hoped to use this rare stretch of leisure to seek out that siren from the outside world and learn about the "world beyond," yet here she was, still asleep through an entire day and counting. "Go call her again. If she still won't come, I'll go fetch her myself—before she sleeps herself to death."

"Oh." Betty stood up to summon the siren lady to dinner, but no sooner had she risen than the siren's languid voice drifted in from the dining-room doorway. "I'm coming, I'm coming… yawn… I slept in just a little. Is that really enough to sleep myself to death…"

"Nearly twenty hours a day—anyone would worry you'd sleep yourself to death. Is this how all you sirens keep time?" Gao Yang said as he turned toward the dining-room doors, only to see the siren lady push them open and "walk" in with an unsteady sway. At once he noticed that her lower half had not taken human form, but was a long serpent's tail—plainly, for this deep-water creature, that sea-snake limb served far better than a pair of human legs.

But in the next instant Gao Yang's expression froze into astonishment: he saw Tir propel herself into the dining room on that serpent's tail—not gliding in with the sinuous elegance of a snake, but hunching forward, hunching, the middle of her tail rising high and then thrusting ahead with a mighty heave…

Tir had lodged here for several days, but she rarely left her room; and on the few occasions she had, she had walked on legs or hopped along on a fish's tail. This was the first time Gao Yang had seen her move in her sea-serpent form. How to put it… it looked rather silly…

"What?" Tir caught his expression and immediately planted her hands on her hips. "Is my tail not pretty enough for you?"

"So this is how you sirens get about on land…?" Rebecca exclaimed in surprise as well—so she was not the only one taken aback. She even wiggled her hand to mimic a snake's crawl. "Don't you walk like this?"

Tir turned and glanced at her own tail, twitching its tip. "Ah, other sirens do walk the way you said. But the first time I grew a tail as a child, there happened to be a sea caterpillar nearby, and I copied it all wrong—never straightened it out since…"

Gao Yang: "…From now on, do your best to get used to walking on legs. In the human world, everyone uses legs. The way you are now, you can't even go out."

He did not have the heart to say the subtext aloud: mainly, a beautiful snake-woman hunching her way forward was simply too idiotic a sight—disgraceful to the point that it deserved to be enshrined in a Hall of Shame for all eternity. The territory already had enough shame of every race and every profession; one more entry in the ledger, and he genuinely feared for the average face-level of the entire Cecil Territory…

Tir, of course, could not imagine such deep-laid considerations. She thought Gao Yang made a great deal of sense—but she had hit upon an even cleverer solution: "How about this: next time, break my legs in public, and from then on I'll simply have people carry me whenever I go out. Or better yet, not go out at all…"

"Just to avoid walking upright, you'd go that far?" Gao Yang was dumbstruck by this siren. "Are all you sirens like this?"

"Not all of us," Tir said, laboring her way over to the table, shoving a chair aside, then coiling her tail neatly into a heap and curling its tip around a fork to toy with the plate before her. "I'm just rather lazy… Oh, you landsmen have quite the variety of food. It's changed shape again?"

"I hope these foods of the land suit your palate," Hetty said with a smile—though her smile twisted ever so slightly when she saw how Tir used that serpent's tail. "In truth, our fare here is already quite plain. This territory is still developing, and many things are…"

"Doesn't matter," Tir waved her tail. "I can't taste it. Sirens have basically no sense of taste."

"You have no sense of taste?" Gao Yang asked in surprise. "Then when you eat… you just swallow it straight down?"

To humans, lacking a sense of taste was plainly a great deprivation—it meant that one of life's greatest pleasures, good food, was forever banished from one's life. But the siren Tir clearly did not mind in the least. She stabbed her fork into the stewed potatoes before her, popped them into her mouth, chewed, and swallowed. "No sense of taste, but we can perceive finer textures. And we sirens are, in essence, closer to elemental creatures—aggregates of the water element. 'Eating' is not a necessity for our survival; it's more like… a form of entertainment. In fact, many sirens don't eat at all in their daily lives. At most, when we catch some unfamiliar fish or shrimp in the sea, we'll take a few bites to test their hardness…"

"How fascinating," Gao Yang said, looking thoroughly intrigued by the sirens' daily life (and indeed he truly was). "So how do you ordinarily live in the sea? Do you build cities? Do you have work and the like?"

"Cities? Our cities would give you landsmen quite a shock!" Tir shot Gao Yang a glance, as though he had asked something absurd. "Our cities are vaster than your largest, more advanced, more solid—and in their day, our cities could fly!"

"Flying cities?" Hetty's eyes went wide at once, unable to hide her curiosity. "Could they be like the elves' Radiant Vault—a magical floating city? Ah, wait—do you know the elves' Radiant Vault?"

"I've never seen it, but some of my sisters have. It floats above the strait south of your continent—the Radiant Vault, with a levitation core handed down from who knows what age, and a broadcast system that can't be shut off at all. Those long-eared creatures called the Silver Elves seem rather proud of their floating city. Some of my sisters once went up out of curiosity, hoping to learn from the elves how they broke free of gravity—only to find that those long-eared creatures can only use it; they cannot build it or repair it. That so-called levitation core was most likely stolen by them from some place or other… tsk, tsk."

Tir passed judgment on the floating city most prized by the Silver Empire in a tone of considerable disdain, yet the words she let slip so casually set wave upon wave stirring in Gao Yang's heart.

Tir's tone did not seem feigned, and the character she had displayed over these past days did not mark her as the type to lie and deceive (though, of course, Gao Yang was sure he could see through a person in a few days—and a person of another race at that; he could only judge by the intelligence he had observed so far). From those few sentences, then, Gao Yang could conclude that the sirens possessed exceedingly advanced technology—otherwise they could never have made such an appraisal of the Silver Empire, the most magically advanced realm on the continent!

It could now also be confirmed that a few sirens had indeed visited the land in the past, visited the kingdom of the elves; they had observed and assessed, delved into the technical essence of the Radiant Vault—and they had done so… originally in hopes of learning the elves' anti-gravity technology?

Had the sirens' own anti-gravity technology run into trouble?

Tir had mentioned just now that the sirens' cities could fly "in their day"—meaning that now they were broken? No longer able to fly?

Had they, too, suffered a break in their technology?

And the sirens' observation and assessment of the elves had clearly disappointed them. They had found that the elves' anti-gravity technology was not even the equal of their own, and that the Silver Elves of the present age had no ability whatsoever to build another Radiant Vault…