Fish imbued with spirituality

Gordon was very serious.

If today's test succeeded, Winslow would see him as more than a student who could hand over tweezers. He would be an assistant who could bring in new projects.

The river flowed as always, black as an old leather shoe that could never be wiped clean.

"How much longer?" Winslow asked quietly, his pen hovering over the page, gathering a bead of ink that refused to fall.

"Depends how far away they live," Gordon said.

"They?"

"Look." Gordon stared at the river.

The water near the bridge pier began to ripple.

Shadows swam just beneath the surface. Straight, silent, without hesitation, they headed for the spot where the extract had entered the water.

Winslow's pen froze in midair. Ink dripped onto the paper, spreading into a small black spot.

Only then did he begin recording.

"Forty seconds from introduction to initial response. Number of targets... three. Directional response..." he murmured.

He had originally intended to write "suspected directional response."

But when he saw those three shadows converge without hesitation on the same point, Winslow paused, then crossed out "suspected."

A professor could doubt his student, but not the facts unfolding before his eyes.

Gray stared at the river.

They did not struggle. They danced around that tiny drop of water. With sufficiently precise guidance, Deepclaw Demons really would deliver themselves to the slaughterhouse.

"...Strange," Gray said. He now fully believed the account of the incident at the Montfort Ancestral Home. Aberrants would not help humans bluff.

"Conquering the 'strange' is part of the history of human science." Winslow did not look up. His swift scribbling had already filled a page. "...Certain Aberrants in the Blackwater River exhibit a directional response to specific spiritual residues. This is a discovery worthy of a textbook."

Just then, a Deepclaw Demon swam too close to Winslow, its gray-white fingers climbing onto the wet stone.

Bang!

Gray drew his gun and fired.

The shot rang out, and the creature toppled backward into the river. Its gray-white fingers clawed two brief ripples across the surface before sinking.

Winslow did not even look up. He merely added another line to his notes.

Probably something about the creature being allergic to metal traveling at four hundred meters per second.

Gordon kept watching the river.

He was increasingly certain that a Source Substance ability was not as simple as gaining an extra supernatural power. It was more like having one's entire system of perception replaced.

When that drop of extract fell into the river, he could see lines of light extending in every direction from its point of entry, connecting straight to every corner of the riverbed where a Deepclaw Demon hid.

Those lines seemed to say, "Come back," and the creatures on the riverbed understood.

The experiment lasted less than ten minutes.

With the dosage strictly controlled this time, the handful of Deepclaw Demons wandered underwater for a while, discovered that it was only a mouthful of cold soup that smelled like home, gradually lost interest, and returned to their respective dwellings.

A scholar's satisfaction appeared on Winslow's face.

Gordon breathed a sigh of relief.

This would also give him more confidence in competing for the scholarship.

In fact, the professor was in such high spirits that he had no time to fish.

He took a water thermometer, a flow meter, and sample bottles from his toolbox and began measuring the river conditions and recording the state of the environment, ensuring that every piece of data could hold its head high at an academic conference.

And so Gordon and Gray got the benefit of the fishing rods and bait the professor had brought.

No one took fishing more seriously than Gray.

A Professional Hunter had to reclaim his dignity somewhere. Since his demon-hunting business had not been going well lately, the fish had better show some consideration.

Gordon fished too.

He mixed the extract into the bait to test its effects. The earthworms acted as though they were drunk.

The professor's purpleheart fishing rod was over three meters long. Gordon cast it hard, sending the horsehair line through the cold, damp air and the silver-gray hook plunging into the black water.

He sat beside the wet stone slabs, holding the rod and watching the float nod gently amid the Blackwater River's colorful oil slicks. Fishing really was fun.

Fish gathered around the hook.

The float soon sank, and Gordon lifted his rod.

Whoosh!

A fish was yanked out of the water and slapped onto the wet stone, its tail scattering a string of droplets.

Gray glanced Gordon's way. Gordon merely figured he had been lucky.

Before long, Gordon had caught quite a few.

But as he kept fishing, something began to feel wrong.

The fish were biting too quickly, and these things did not look much like fish.

[Red pike. It made a decision that defied its ancestors.]

[Two-headed bass. We're not bad, right?]

[Tailless trout. It swims on faith and momentum.]

Huh? What the hell were these things?

Gordon lifted the fish out one by one and laid them on the bank.

Scales, fins, gills, eyes-they had everything.

But up close, nothing looked quite right. Tiny fleshy growths sprouted between their scales, and wispy matter floated inside their eyeballs.

They looked like fish, yet not one was willing to simply be a fish.

One small fish already had a tail split in two when he hauled it out. It would probably disagree with itself about which direction to swim.

Gray watched the growing pile of fish at Gordon's feet, and his mood worsened. When Gordon arranged them in a row, Gray thought he was reviewing his troops.

So he asked for some of that "soaked bait."

"This river is full of weird fish," Gordon warned.

"I've seen plenty of weird things. What's a few more fish?" Gray was unconcerned.

"That costs money," Gordon said. "One silver pound per worm."

"Robbery?"

"The academy's earthworms are high-value-added products."

Gray laughed in exasperation.

"I'll trade you this. I've hardly used it." Gray took out a hunting knife.

Gordon's eyes lit up. He took it and turned it over in his hands.

The knife was beautiful, well suited to slicing and whittling, hand-forged and quenched. Oxidation had turned its brass guard a dark gold. He liked it the moment he held it.

"Deal." Gordon pushed over an entire box of earthworms soaked in the extract.

Gray switched to an extract-soaked worm and got a bite the moment he lowered his hook.

"Hey!" Gray lifted his rod.

The surface broke, and he hauled up an octopus that clearly had no business being in a river.

The octopus's eight arms curled into a ball, and it suddenly spoke:

"Respected sir, I would like to tell you about our Heavenly Father and Savior..."

Bang!

Gray shot it dead without expression, then casually kicked it back into the river.

"Those dripping-wet people are at it again," Gray complained.

"Dripping-wet people?" Gordon asked.

"The [Wet-Foot People]. Spend long enough by the river, and you'll run into them sooner or later," Gray said.

Gordon looked thoughtful.

Gray wanted to see if he could find something that could not talk.

He caught another fish, this one with three eyes, and stared at it with a frown.

All three of the fish's eyes stared back. It struggled for a while, until it finally died.

"This used to be a bleak." Winslow had finally noticed the strange fish.

He took the three-eyed bleak and held it up to the light. His expression suddenly grew a little distant.

"When I was young," he said, "the fish in the Blackwater River were edible. Fishermen set out at dawn and returned at dusk, and there were real fish in their holds. When my wife was still alive, she loved the Blackwater River's silverfish best..."

He missed the days when the river produced fish rather than incident reports.

"This river had its good years." Having finished his lyrical reflection, Winslow lowered his head and went back to writing his footnotes.

No wonder the Old Fish Market used to be a fish market, but was now a distribution hub for Aberrant materials...

Gordon continued examining the fish.

Whether he or Gray had caught them, every one of these so-called "mutant fish" contained tiny points of light.

It was as though someone had crushed minute flecks of stardust and mixed them into their flesh, gills, spines, and organs.

One fish alone amounted to nothing. But there were already more than a dozen in the bucket.

A point of light, then another, then another.

Gathered together, they were a different matter.

Then he suddenly thought of the question from the opposite direction.

With this bait, they had caught nothing but strange fish. Not a single normal one.

The strange fish were attracted to the bait, and the Deepclaw Demons were attracted to the Silverfish Casket.

As those two facts sat side by side in his mind, the line between them suddenly brightened.

At its core, there was an attraction between spiritualities of the same origin.

They kept fishing until evening.

Gray had clearly enjoyed himself. In the past, he would sit for half a day to catch one fish. Now they were biting one after another.

"Mr. Gray, are you taking these fish with you? You seem to be enjoying yourself," Gordon asked.

"No need." Gray stretched. "I'm a great Essence Hunter, after all. What would people on the street think if I went back to the office carrying a bucket of strange fish?"

"You live in the office?"

"If your consultation fee alone was twenty gold pounds, you wouldn't want to miss a single client knocking in the middle of the night either."

That made perfect sense.

"Then I'll take them off your hands." Gordon gladly accepted the lot. Fish containing trace amounts of spirituality were extremely useful.

"You're studying these?" Winslow looked up.

"More or less," Gordon said. "Fish mutations. A follow-up research topic."

"Label them properly. Don't let Peter eat them by mistake." Winslow asked no further questions. A bucket of river fish did not merit a place in his notebook.

By the time he returned to the dissection room, it was pitch-black outside.

Gordon hoisted the bucket of fish onto the dissection table.

The fishy smell immediately spread.

He cut the fish open one by one with the hunting knife.

He had to admit that the hunting knife Gray had given him was excellent.

He scraped off scales, sliced flesh, split spines, spread the organs on trays, then used precipitating salts to separate the spiritual imprints and attached matter.

One point of light. Then another.

After he worked through the entire night, all that remained on the dissection table was a small mountain of fish bones stripped of their secrets.

In the end, Gordon left a pinch of something almost invisible at the bottom of a glass dish. It looked like damp salt and was only the size of a fingernail.

Gordon stared fixedly at it as those faint lights finally coalesced.

It was still absurdly small, of course, but it carried a distinct thought.

[Spiritual powder. Adaptation, settling, residue. It came from something greater.]

By then, his fingers had spent an entire night soaking in foul water. His fingertips were wrinkled, stiff with cold.

The work was troublesome, disgusting, and time-consuming. No normal person would do it.

And that was precisely why the tiny glimmer in the glass dish belonged to him alone.