A transparent, teardrop-shaped crystal was held in place by the force field of the ultrapure-water craft Bailan was piloting, trailing behind it.
This crystal ship came from an unknown civilization. It had no living pilot, nor any intelligent system like those found in ancient creations. So after the ultrapure-water craft's force field immobilized it, the ship showed no spontaneous defensive response.
Even at the enormous risk of damaging her craft—and perhaps never returning to human society in Starveil Land—Bailan naturally wanted to learn as much as possible from the ship: its technological secrets, the history of the unknown civilization behind it, and even the civilization's coordinates in the darkness!
Beep beep beep...
The rhythmic vibrations inside the craft continued.
Before long, Bailan reached a stretch of shallow sea where the undercurrents were relatively calm.
Blocked by the artificial supervolcano created by the anti-gravity disaster weapon, the speed of the seafloor currents here had dropped by more than one level compared with earlier.
In the darkness, a sea creature's silver tail flashed past. The glimpse of that enormous tail was enough to suggest a gigantic body, which vanished into the even darker depths.
A ripple passed through the water, and Bailan drifted out of the ultrapure-water craft.
Her breathing was calm. She felt like a single grain of sand in a boundless desert, and so she wouldn't draw anyone's attention.
Bailan instinctively glanced in the direction the giant creature had disappeared, but saw nothing unusual.
But even as one of the finest Extraordinary Scholars in the Academic World, she knew that in deep waters so far from Starveil Land, the evolution of the food chain had long since diverged drastically from what humans in the Academic World generally understood. The alien environment had given rise to all kinds of deformed, mutated