Interspecies Exchange (4)
Chester carefully peeled Monia away from where she clung to him, making sure not to wake her, then turned to study the world outside.
Aside from the occasional chirp of insects, the forest was silent and still. Beyond the darkness, the lake glowed with a soft light that had not been there in the morning. When he lifted his gaze higher, an impossibly vast and beautiful sea of stars stretched across the sky.
In the midst of that beauty he could have watched forever, the underbrush suddenly rustled.
A tiny sound. Truly tiny.
The sound of something stepping on grass.
Was the creature small? Or was it simply large enough that its size should have made more noise, yet it still managed to walk this quietly?
Chester’s hand drifted toward the machete he had left near the entrance. He drew it carefully toward himself so as not to startle whatever was outside, then gave Ant a quiet signal to stop its low growling.
If the thing simply passed by, that would be ideal.
No matter how sharp Chester’s senses were, they could never match a beast’s eyes in the dark. The lake’s glow and the unusually bright moonlight would let him fight if he had to, but it still fell short of broad daylight.
I deliberately built the house so it wouldn’t stand out.
He had covered the ropes and oddly angled branches with heaps of leaves so the whole thing looked like just another pile of foliage. The entrance was screened by a rock a short distance away. Anything artificial that might catch a beast’s interest—baskets, traces of a campfire—he always kept well away from the house itself.
Then the sound of trampled brush stopped, and the sound of water lapping began.
Drinking?
Compared to the earlier footsteps, the noise of drinking was thunderous, as if the entire lake had been struck by a violent storm.
So it is a big one after all.
A creature that hunted at night would have adapted to silence its steps—just as an owl, master of the night sky, glides without a sound.
Just drink and leave.
That was Chester’s hope. Then the drinking stopped. The sound of heavy steps crushing undergrowth returned—and the problem was that the sound was coming closer instead of fading away.
Chester and Ant held their breath as tightly as they could.
The sound approached. Closer. Until it was right beside them.
“…….”
- …….
CRACK-CRUNCH!
Something enormous crushed part of the house, then lumbered off into the distance.
“…….”
Chester swept the collapsed section over himself to hide his exposed body and waited until every last sound had vanished.
The next morning, Monia woke, saw the ruined house, and made a scene.
“Kyaa! What is this?!”
“An animal came by last night and stomped on it.”
“What?! I didn’t notice a thing!”
Watching Monia scream in shock, Chester swallowed a bitter smile. He could have called her dull, but senses were almost entirely a matter of talent—something you were born with. In that regard Chester surpassed even his own father.
Training and experience could sharpen the senses to a degree, yet there were limits. A six-year-old child born on the plains often had better eyes than an assassin whose senses had been honed by brutal training and dangerous drugs. No matter how keen a human’s instincts, they would never match the beasts that could sense a typhoon or earthquake rolling in from far away and react long before people ever noticed.
“We’ll have to be more careful even when we sleep from now on.”
Monia poked through the wreckage, comparing the crushed parts with what remained intact.
“Now I understand why you went to all that trouble building a house up in the trees.”
“I already explained the reasons before.”
“I never really felt it in my body. We haven’t had a serious typhoon since that day.”
“True enough.”
Hearing something a hundred times never beat experiencing it once.
“By the way, how long are we going to keep training before we head back? We can’t stay here forever.”
“Three more days.”
“Three days?”
“Yeah.”
Chester’s reason for choosing three days was simple.
Three days. Within that time he intended to tell the strange creature they had been exchanging with that they were leaving—and to show it the location of their home.
The creature was a valuable source of information: culturally capable of exchange, far more knowledgeable about the island than they were, and friendly enough to share food freely even though it had received almost nothing in return. To keep the thread of contact with this young master of the island from snapping, Chester planned to wait roughly three more days for it to appear.
“So for the next three days we train hard, all right?”
Chester had already recovered his original physical ability and then some.
“Hieee…”
That left Monia.
And…
My body’s fine now. Time to start exploring under the lake.
He would uncover the secret of this mysterious water.
Chester dove into the lake.
From his swimming drills he already knew that opening his eyes underwater caused no problems, so he looked freely around.
As expected, nothing on the walls but water plants.
He watched the weeds sway with the current, then carefully examined a hole leading downward into the earth. That was the outlet through which the lake’s water drained to form the river. Somewhere else there would be an inlet feeding water back in.
Using the flow he felt against his body and the way the weeds moved, he roughly guessed the location and swam toward it.
Fortunately, the lake held no aggressive creatures near the surface. There were many kinds of aquatic life, but none large enough to target something Chester’s size. That was true only of the shallows, however. Deeper down, fish larger than his own torso glided past—monsters with blade-like scales and fins. One of them casually lunged at a turtle and shattered its shell in a single strike.
If one of those bites me, there won’t even be bones left.
Chester surfaced for air, then dove again and swam across the broad lake. Somewhere he might find a clue to its secret, so he forced himself to cross the wide expanse even though the effort was grueling.
Monia sat near the shore, watching two cushion rafts floating on the surface. Ropes tied them to Chester’s waist; they drifted slowly after him, tracing the path he swam. The rafts were insurance—if some creature dragged him under, they would give him a little resistance to fight against.
So the water comes in here. Only one inlet?
Watching the inflow, Chester noticed something odd. The water entering the lake was clear and ordinary, without the blue glow. The transparent current pushed the luminous water aside, forming small, weak eddies.
Then going farther upstream won’t reveal the secret of this mysterious water.
The secret lay in the lake itself.
But—
…I can’t explore any farther.
The huge, ferocious carnivorous fish living in the depths were one problem. The bigger problem was the sheer scale of the lake.
Too big. Too deep.
Diving that far bare-bodied? Just getting down and back up would empty every bit of air in his lungs. Exploring a lake of this size without equipment was physically impossible.
Time to surface.
It was genuinely disappointing, but Chester abandoned the plan of bringing the secret home and mass-producing the mysterious water there.
Maybe this is a power humans aren’t meant to covet.
Greed made people ugly and invited ruin.
He gave up the secret of the glowing water and climbed back onto the shore.
The young master of the island came to the lake as usual and looked at the softly glowing water.
The color’s a little pale, but it still looks just like the sky lake at the Summit.
At the very center of the Floating Island’s highest point lay a lake more than twice as large as this one, shining the same deep blue as the high sky. The cliffs surrounding that lake were home to the People of the Summit.
Probably a large fragment that split off from the stone holding the ancestors’ spirits just happened to settle here. Leaving an ancestor anywhere but the Summit feels wrong… Maybe I should retrieve it later.
With that thought, the young island master appeared before Chester and Monia after several days’ absence.
As repayment for the rope, he carefully held out the object he had brought. He made a gesture similar to the one Chester had used when trading rope for goods, then watched Chester’s reaction closely.
What face would he make?
“?!”
Chester’s eyes went wide and his mouth fell open as he stared at what rested in his hands.
“Th-this…”
“Chester? What is it?”
“Where did you get this?!”
He shouted the question at the young island master. The creature looked thoroughly satisfied with the reaction, grinned to himself, and gave a firm nod.
In Chester’s hands lay the “hard, shining stone” the young master had brought.
Its true identity was ore.