The Identity Riddle

"Yep." Zijin speared another piece of fish and kept eating. "That's why I kept wondering why you didn't put up a shielding spell formation. I thought that, as someone from another world, you didn't mind me looking whenever I wanted!"

Su Ming covered his face and began knocking his head against the table.

Zijin finished the fish on her plate and wanted more, but Su Ming wouldn't let her eat too much. He then performed a full examination, switched over to Little Spiky Head, and sent the results to the online doctor.

When his perspective returned to the Zhiyuan's workshop, Zijin was already lying in the sickbed again, while the skeleton servants were cleaning up and washing the dishes.

Su Ming followed the new medical instructions, prepared the medication, and put her on an IV.

Zijin watched the clear liquid flow slowly through the IV set. "It's a little cold. Can I heat it up?"

"Don't." Su Ming poured some hot water into his own cup, wound the IV tube around it a few times, then pressed the cup into Zijin's hand.

Once Su Ming had finished the treatment, he began organizing the medication records. Then he took out a notebook and began writing and marking things down.

"What are you writing?"

"A log," Su Ming answered. "There are quite a few problems to deal with right now. There's still fuel, but not much, so we need to find a source as soon as possible. The steam engine is generally in decent shape, but it has lots of minor problems. Then there are the issues of navigation, positioning, and reconnaissance that we need to solve."

"I need to rest first," Zijin said.

"I know." Su Ming kept writing. "Your magic is an important resource for solving our problems, so your first priority is to recover as quickly as possible."

Something suddenly occurred to him. "Miss Zijin, would you be interested in continuing our earlier conversation and telling me your story?"

"Our earlier conversation?" The girl remembered. "Oh, that. What I said last night was everything I wanted to tell you. Scholar Bay Owl, the White Bone Fortress, Zijin-they're all me. That's a riddle."

"Again?" Su Ming raised an eyebrow. "In our world, riddlers are despised!"

And was Miss Scholar really not doing this deliberately to get back at Su Ming for not staying up to chat with her last night?

"There's a reward for solving the riddle," Zijin told Su Ming. "Anyway, you've already seen all of me, so please figure out my identity!"

"All right," Su Ming said helplessly.

He didn't intend to think about the riddle right now. After everything that had happened one after another over the past few days, he was tired too. There were still quite a few chores to do today, and he would have to make lunch soon. After going hungry for days, Su Ming was now extremely enthusiastic about food.

He picked up the cleaver on the counter and headed out of the workshop. "I'm going up to the deck to clean the fish I caught last night. I need to salt them."

Zijin took a look with Omniscient Vision and found more than a dozen fairly large sea fish piled on the deck. "That's a lot. Huh? You only know necromancy-how did you do it?" she asked in surprise. "Oh, you must have used the fishing techniques from your world?"

"That's right," Su Ming admitted.

There were so many fish that Su Ming was extravagant with his knife, taking basically only the best meat. Zijin sent a few zombies over to help.

"What equipment did you use to fish?" She looked around but didn't see any new, unusual tools on the ship.

"What else would I use? The ship, of course. The Zhiyuan," Su Ming answered.

"I know you fished on the Zhiyuan," Zijin said. "I mean, what did you use to fish while you were on it?"

"I used the Zhiyuan itself," Su Ming answered. "Didn't you see that huge propeller at the back? I drove the ship in a circle, then went around a second time and picked up the fish the propeller had knocked out."

"...I see." Zijin was deeply impressed. "The fishing in your world is amazing."

"You flatter me." Su Ming shamelessly accepted the praise.

"Speaking of which." Su Ming recalled a question and nudged a fish over a meter long with his foot. "Are there fish or sea beasts in the ocean that can use magic?"

"No."

"Huh? Doesn't your world have magic? Why aren't there any magic beasts?" Su Ming asked in puzzlement. "Are they all ordinary animals?"

"Hmm... the power in your world is called technology, right?"

"You could say that," Su Ming answered, though he thought the magic of this world was more scientific than science itself.

"Are there any wild beasts in your world that have mastered technology?"

"Of course not!" Su Ming answered. "They're not intelligent enough. Even if there were the occasional exception, wild beast populations don't have systems of education and inheritance."

"Isn't it the same thing? Any individual that can use magic has a vast settlement behind it, and it must have the ability to learn, research, and inherit knowledge," Zijin answered. "So wild beasts can't use magic, and anything that can use magic can't be a wild beast!"

"Of course, there are a few exceptional cases, like training cats or dogs to spit out little balls of water and the like," the scholar added.

After Su Ming had dealt with two fish, he noticed that Zijin was already controlling the zombies to copy his method, and they seemed set to surpass him at it.

He simply stopped and went to the engine room to carry out maintenance. Afterward, he started the Zhiyuan and sailed east at an economical speed of twelve knots.

On the deck, Su Ming held the railing and gazed into the sea breeze. All he could see was the vast ocean; he saw nothing else.

Gradually, his mood began to sink.

Su Ming had a family too. His parents lived in an ordinary county town; his father was a worker, and his mother did odd jobs. Su Ming had grown up in that ordinary but warm home.

Su Ming wasn't sure whether his parents knew he had become a murder suspect. The police might ask his parents about his whereabouts, but they might also use other means-he really had no experience with this sort of thing.

Su Ming didn't know what to do.

"Feeling down?" Zijin asked.

She wasn't speaking through a message. She had assembled a wheelchair herself and come out onto the deck with a book.

"You can only stay for ten minutes. You can't be out in the wind too long."

"I'm just getting some sun," Zijin said.

Su Ming glanced at her skin, so pale it was almost translucent. It really had been a long time since she'd seen the sun.

Su Ming went back to the workshop, took a tube of sunscreen from his suitcase, and returned to hand it to Zijin. "Put it on your body and face and rub it in evenly. It blocks ultraviolet rays."

The girl took it curiously. "That spell formation that blocks ultraviolet rays while still letting you get some sun is very troublesome. I can't use it." She unsealed the sunscreen. "It hasn't been opened?"

"I bought it for my mother," Su Ming answered. He told Zijin about his family on Earth. Over the years, after Su Ming started working, his family's life had visibly improved. He had originally planned to take time off from the factory during the coming slow season and go on a trip to the seaside with his parents. Their last trip had been before he was born.

But then something like this had happened. Now he had come alone to the ocean of another world, while his parents were in another world, worried about him.