Edge of Reality

Although it was called noon, it actually felt a bit later than that.

Kraft and Lucius took turns leaning against a relatively clean wooden board to rest, cycling through several times before the sleeping people finally began to wake.

Like a massive, silent alarm clock going off, the residents of the sleeping district were roused in unison, more synchronized than students waking up in a dormitory in another world.

The previously silent houses began to emit sounds of activity. Different feet stepped onto wooden floorboards, unknown metal and wooden utensils collided, and the noisy chatter was interspersed with a few incomprehensible curses.

Human consciousness was returned from the dream realm in bulk, dumped back into reality to begin a day they had already missed a small portion of.

Then came the harsh, grating sound of poor-quality door hinges turning. People emerged one after another, holding things that looked like food, eating as they walked toward the harbor.

Kraft intercepted a middle-aged man holding a piece of moldy dried fish.

"Hello, if you don't mind, could I hire you for a moment?"

"Of course!" He agreed at top speed, glaring fiercely at the people nearby who were looking over. "Four copper coins will do, I can help you with half a day's work."

Perhaps because it was hard to find work after noon had passed, he accepted Kraft's employment at a very low price.

His yellowed, blackened teeth bit hard into the somewhat brittle dried fish, crushing the fibrous meat along with the bones and making a teeth-grinding sound. He chewed a few times in his mouth and swallowed with difficulty.

"So, what do you need me to do?"

Kraft was shocked by this glass-swallowing style of eating and felt a pang of sympathy for the man's mouth and esophagus. "No rush, eat first. I want to ask something: how long ago did you start noticing that you were waking up later and later?"

"Now that I think about it, it's been like this for over a month. At first, I didn't feel much, but I didn't expect it to turn out like this. Life is getting harder and harder."

Although he didn't know why anyone would care about this, the middle-aged man answered the question while eating. Crumbs and spit flew everywhere, and he didn't notice his new employer moving half a step to avoid being directly in front of him.

Kraft stood to the side watching him finish the fish in his hand. As the man swallowed the last bite, his Adam's apple bobbed with effort, and Kraft felt he could write a case report on esophageal scarring caused by a special diet.

"We came here out of curiosity about this matter. We now suspect that the water you usually drink has problems. Can you take us to see it?"

"Sure, although my family usually goes to fetch the water, I still know the way." The middle-aged man pressed his chest, looking as if he were in pain. "Let's go then."

He led Kraft and Lucius along the twisting, winding narrow alleys, constantly bumping into people who had just come out to look for work.

The opposing directions meant they had to frequently turn sideways to squeeze past, or one party had to retreat into a side alley to make room.

In general, their direction of travel was similar to the way they had come. They bypassed the routes they had previously investigated, passed by the Red Algae Well, and walked for another ten minutes or so to reach their destination.

It was a well that looked relatively normal, with a wellhead surrounded by the most orderly stones Kraft had seen in this place.

An open space was left around it, and the people coming to fetch water had formed several long lines. There was no windlass; they lowered buckets with ropes and pulled them back up, making progress quite slow. It probably wouldn't be easy to get them to give up their time for an inspection.

Kraft didn't particularly like environments crowded with people, especially when the frequency of bathing among this group wasn't very high; gathering together made the already stale air even more turbid.

His nose, which had just adapted to the local air, was hit with the smell of sweat, body odor, and other indescribable scents, causing him to quickly abandon the idea of queuing himself.

"This is eleven copper coins; five are your payment." Kraft fished out most of the loose change from his coin purse and handed it to the middle-aged man. "Use the rest to buy a cleaner bucket and help me queue for a bucket of water."

Being a lazy dog is shameful, but it is certainly very comfortable.

Kraft and Lucius found a shady spot to stand and watch others queue. The small wellhead allowed at most three people to draw water at once. There were barely three lines at the wellhead, but further back, they scattered into a mess, making it impossible to tell which was which.

After negotiating with a few people at the end of the line, the middle-aged man successfully bought a bucket and began to weave imperceptibly left and right through the vaguely defined queues, choosing the closest path to move forward.

In the crowd, Kraft soon lost track of him. Bored, he began to feel sleepy and propped his head up with his hand.

The sun was high in the sky; it was the time of day when he would usually finish lunch and take a short nap. His biological clock urged him to find a comfortable surface and press his face against it to enjoy the rare moment of daily relaxation.

To reserve time for the investigation, he had set off from the academy very early today, going from Elm Street to the Salt Tide District. He hadn't even eaten lunch, nor did he have the appetite to.

Suddenly idle, fatigue took advantage of the void, making him feel as if he could fall asleep standing up.

His half-closed eyes looked through the red lenses, and the unreal scene became increasingly blurry. The crowd swayed before him, their outlines softening.

Diffuse double images, red filters, and human-shaped color blocks moved slowly, like red paint on an inclined plane merging and bleeding into each other. It wasn't vibrant; the tone was gradually darkening.

Red usually makes people feel alert and stimulated, but this shade of red made him feel even more melancholy. He thought of viscous venous blood flowing and coagulating on the wall of a transparent container, no longer possessing the vitality it had inside a living body.

He felt himself falling—the sensation of weightlessness from a dream—only lighter, softer. In a half-dreaming, half-waking state, he left the cumbersome and chaotic reality, falling into the depths, hiding in a place without surgeries, without complications, and without investigations.

His hearing also became dull. The noisy human voices faded in his ears. His restless consciousness no longer paid attention to what they were saying, and the language center of his brain entered a low-power state, unwilling to translate the vibrations in the air into effective information.

The dull sound of a bucket hitting the water in the well, the clatter of wooden objects against the stone wall, loud coughing—simple sounds were barely distinguishable.

Instinctively, he lazily adjusted himself to a half-dreaming state, ignoring the nerve impulses coming from his senses, letting himself drift away from the world.

Kraft felt as if he were in place, yet also as if he were no longer there. In the haziness, he heard a particularly clear splashing sound ring out in his ears, and the sensation of weightlessness came to an abrupt end.

The hazy state was not broken but fixed. The sound became more delicate and gentle, like sand turning into finely ground flour, and it became even harder to distinguish its content.

His consciousness spread out softly, enjoying a moment of peace.

The only drawback was that a strange scent still lingered at the tip of his nose. It wasn't the smell of sweat, nor rot, nor the herbs in a bird mask; it didn't seem to be collected by his sense of smell.

It seemed to be intensifying, and the fine, soft, comfortable part of the sound approached along with it. It transformed from intangible to tangible, pressing against the clothing on his back, stroking his consciousness.

Every sense was pleased by it, sending signals of "softness" and "comfort." His sense of smell joined in, acknowledging that while the scent was strange, it was soft and pleasant.

Like a young girl's hand, like silk and tulle, it drew closer, and the sensation of weightlessness appeared once more.

His eyelids drooped. The black-red light before his eyes grew thinner, almost completely fading away, replaced by a moonlit darkness, with a soft white light growing within it.

His consciousness bathed in it, and just like enjoying every normal nap, a thread of suspicion flashed through the intoxication.

It gently extended a cool, soft hand, wanting to pluck away the disharmony in this serenity.

This clumsy, counterproductive movement awakened the keen consciousness of Kraft, his suspicion rapidly escalating into alertness as he dredged up everything that had just occurred from his memory to re-analyze it.

His intuition tasted a malice that should not have existed within that soft, gentle sensation.

The speed at which it clung to him suddenly accelerated, as if it had sensed the change in Kraft, wrapping around him from behind even faster.

Its reckless movement exposed more of its incongruities, like a starfish flipping over its colorful, beautiful back to vomit its stomach out for a meal. The extreme dissonance, viscous and nauseating, assaulted the senses that had been immersed in comfort only a moment before, the drastic nerve impulses stimulating his brain and reaching deep into his soul.

Before the part of him from the other world could respond, the conditioned reflexes formed by Kraft's years of training in his native world were activated; the countless lessons and beatings from his grandfather had gifted him with extraordinary reaction speed.

Every muscle in his body was mobilized; he ducked his head to dodge a potential attack, smashed his elbow backward, and used the momentum to turn and retreat, putting distance between them.

He felt as if he had torn something open as he moved, and fear compelled him to reach for the hilt of the sword hidden beneath his robe; his eyes, having just opened, could only see the red of his lenses as they struggled to adjust to the light.

The blade left its scabbard, swinging diagonally upward toward the position he sensed, though he desperately restrained the urge to strike with all his might, leaving enough strength to change his move. The first strike was merely to force the opponent back and buy time for his vision to return to normal.

He carefully felt the resistance against his hand; whether the opponent chose to avoid the edge or parry it head-on, both outcomes suited him just fine.

Unexpectedly, the blade seemed to slice into something, cutting through a loose, fragile object with ease and cleaving apart several structures of uneven density.

Exclamations and screams erupted from behind him, and the sound of chaotic footsteps retreating into the distance indicated that many people were fleeing the area, though fortunately, no approaching footsteps came to interfere with his judgment.

His vision was gradually recovering, and he peered through the red glass to inspect the results of his strike. Regardless of what it was—man or ghost—being slashed with such a deep gash would certainly not be pleasant.

Kraft forced his eyes to stay open, the blinding light causing his pupillary sphincter muscles to contract sharply as his tear glands secreted fluid. He had to fight the instinctual reflex to close his eyes, straining with all his might to see what lay before him.

He saw that massive, hideous gash, but it did not exist on any slime monster or mysterious enemy.

It was a wooden wall.