Mysterious Voyage, Final Defiance

The charm in Victoria's hand glimmered with a faint golden sheen. Its extraordinarily unusual surface texture lay somewhere between metal and crystal; whenever the light brushed across it, a thin, shifting halo appeared upon its surface—no natural or artificial material known to mankind possessed such a strange texture, and Gawain was truly all too familiar with it.

This was the material of the Eternal Stone Tablet, the material of the wreckage fragments surrounding Amun the Giant Deer's corpse, the ancient alloy seemingly left behind by some advanced civilization's fleet!!

Yet the charm in Victoria's hand was vastly different from those "fragments" in their original state: it bore obvious traces of secondary processing, human-used runes on its surface, and even the Verde Family crest!

And as far as Gawain knew, humanity had not found any means of processing the "Eternal Stone Tablet" over the past several centuries. Forget melting and recasting it—they could not even chip off a fragment. Even during the Spark Era of the Gondor Empire, Camil and his colleagues, aided by advanced Gondor equipment, had only barely been able to cut the wreckage near Amun the Giant Deer!!

Then how had the charm in Victoria's hand been made?!

"...This charm was forged by Grand Duke Modir Wilde six hundred years ago," Victoria said honestly, though she had not expected Gawain to care so much about her family charm. "Its name is 'Cold Calamity.' As you said, its material resembles the Eternal Stone Tablet, but it was not made by processing an Eternal Stone Tablet... Where exactly Grand Duke Modir Wilde obtained these materials, and where he forged this charm, remain mysteries to this day... I only know that it was connected to a maritime expedition."

The instant Gawain heard the words "maritime expedition," his heart stirred, and he