Kraft circled the table, moved the candlestick aside, turned a ceramic grinding bowl upside down over the sample, and flipped the hourglass to start the timer.
After two cycles, he lifted the bowl and repeated his observations. The results confirmed that the crystals were melting, and the trend was becoming more pronounced over time. Their increasingly rounded edges showed subtle signs of an intermediate solid-liquid state.
Calling it melting wasn't quite right; the transformation differed from that of ordinary substances. Though it had looked more like crystallization when it formed, it wasn't gradually shrinking like an ice cube, turning into liquid layer by layer. Instead, it softened like a block of wax.
Through the refracting convex lens, the magnified particles appeared to deform as if breaking out of a shell, breaking through the disguise of their hard, geometric crystal exteriors to incubate their true forms.
Kraft instinctively thought of spores activated by their environment, gradually completing their activation and transforming into something new—something materially similar, yet entirely different in nature.
Kup took the lens and glanced through it. For a moment, he doubted his own eyes, feeling as if he'd seen something difficult to describe.
It was like catching a fleeting glimpse on a Dunling street at night. His instincts recognized something before his conscious mind could make sense of it, but when he looked again, he couldn't recall what it was. He instinctively peered closer, trying to recapture the thought that had vanished in a flash.
But looking more closely only brought more confusion. The tiny particles seemed to possess an astonishing wealth of features: damp icicles hanging from a dilapidated eave, thick wax dripping from a Church candlestick, waterlogged bulges in the mudflats, suspicious movement inside a rotten fish, and countless other things just as hard to describe.