Alice, however, introduced it to me quite generously.
“Although different seasons have different celestial phenomena, and the stars in the sky differ a little, in a span of time as short as a single day the stars in the sky, like the sun and the moon, barely move at all. Father once taught me how to tell direction by the stars.”
“Eh…”
Aside from the part about the sun and moon not moving either, this was rather similar to our world.
But then Alice said,
“At night we can tell direction by the seasonal constellations, then judge the time from the relative positions of the constellations and the Heavenly Ring… In short, the Heavenly Ring gradually rises from the east at dusk and gradually disappears in the west at dawn… You can see the Heavenly Ring for about half of each day.”
Mm…
So to some extent the Heavenly Ring was equivalent to this world’s [sun], only it appeared at night?
How strange.
It made me deeply curious about that band of light shining in the night sky.
“Then what about the daytime?” I asked without thinking.
“Mm…”
The question gave Alice some trouble.
She slightly furrowed her brow, closed her eyes, and even her mouth turned into a shape like a wavy line.
She mm’d very seriously for a long while, then said,
“If you don’t rely on tools like clocks and maps, you really can’t tell time or direction. But I often travel at night, so it doesn’t affect me that much.”
…
That was true.
Ding—
?
What was that sound?
In a world like this, in a situation like this, suddenly hearing a sound like a prompt from electronic equipment really did make a person confused for a moment.
But then a small marker composed of a pair of wings and an arrow appeared in my field of view, and after that a pale-blue dotted line pointed toward that marker.
[Eden signal source detected. Distance: 588 m]
Eh?
An HUD prompt…
It had not popped up again after I encountered the Hero’s party, and I had forgotten it even existed.
The Halo above my head clearly brightened a little when the prompt appeared, enough that Alice couldn’t help turning her gaze toward me.
“Yulin-chan… your Halo…”
“Ah, yeah. I know.”
[Eden], in our world, was the eternal paradise created by God as mentioned in the Bible.
A signal source from Eden.
This word had appeared in my vision from time to time from the moment I “woke.”
There was probably some inseparable relationship between me and the word [Eden].
That made me look at the buoy pointing not far away and break into hurried steps.
“Yulin-chan?”
Without attending to Alice’s confusion, I simply led her on my own around behind the hillside.
The numbers floating above the buoy that represented distance grew smaller and smaller with my hurried steps.
Rounding a corner to the back of the slope, the cliff on this side slanted toward the crown of the sky and blocked most of it, bringing a wave of oppression that hit me in the face.
Sand had piled at the foot of the mountain, forming a sand slope.
The place the buoy pointed to was at the top of the sand slope, near the foot of the mountain.
But when I stood at the position that overlapped the marker, there was nothing nearby.
[Access granted. Connected to the Eden Wide Area Network]
[Attempting to establish connection with the Central Bureau. Failed]
[Attempting to establish connection with the Archive Bureau. Failed]
[Attempting to establish connection with the Security Bureau. Failed]
[Searching nearest public servers. Node count: 0]
[Unable to access Eden public service terminal. Please check link integrity]
?
It seemed I had connected to something.
The Halo above my head flashed twice, then returned to its usual faint glow.
Under Alice’s puzzled gaze I crouched down.
Beneath my feet there was nothing but countless grains of sand.
“Yulin-chan?”
Perhaps afraid I had forgotten her, Alice behind me slowly moved up in front of me.
“There seems to be something under here.”
Thinking that, I told her what I thought.
“Eh? Underneath?”
Hearing me say that, Alice began rummaging in her robe again.
Before long she took out that short staff from the robe and pointed it at the spot beneath my feet.
“Leave it to me. I just happen to have a useful spell.”
“Mm.”
The feeling of fine sand falling through the gaps between my fingers, grain by distinct grain.
It was as if sand had long since become a memory sunk deep into me.
Moonlight dyed the sand and dust remaining in my palm with tiny glints.
I gazed at those fragments that looked like stardust and kept feeling I had seen a similar scene somewhere.
A thread of fine powder glittering with silver light under the moon was scattered from Alice’s palm onto the sand.
The wand in her hand, less than a foot long, flickered with a warm pale-yellow glow as the powder fell.
The faint light traced a wavy line through the night as her wrist swept.
In her soft chanting, the sand at the foot of the mountain rushed down to both sides like flowing water.
“O earth spirits in the land of dreams, I am sorry to disturb your sweet sleep. I offer you a wisp of crystal dust. Please open a path for me… Wake, wake. I have prepared a song of praise for you. I hope you will not take offense… La la la…”
She was really singing…
Alice’s light humming was especially gentle in this night.
In the faint radiance of those glittering motes stirring the sand and stone aside, it was as if starlight had fallen to earth.
After humming for a little while, Alice cleared her throat, then put away the wand in her hand and said to me,
“Ah, well. I’ve made a fool of myself.”
“…”
After a short silence I walked toward the sand slope again.
“It sounded pretty nice. Mm.”
It had the feel of a folk song.
I thought it was probably a song passed down in Alice’s hometown.
There were no lyrics, and the melody was not rich, but on a night like this it felt especially fitting.
The sand slope parted to both sides under Alice’s magic, revealing the original look of the mountain’s foot.
Who knew how long it had been buried under yellow sand, but the sand piled on both sides was about as tall as I was.
I stepped down.
Beneath my feet was a hard object, dark and icy in the faint light of night.
When I touched it, it felt like metal.
It was clearly man-made.
Digging away the sand to the side with my hands, I found it was an object like a metal pipe.
I looked up toward the foot of the mountain.
This metal pipe was probably connected to some part of the slope, or rather some part of it was exposed at the surface.
But aside from that, there was nothing else.
“What is it…?”
Just as I was equally puzzled, Alice crouched beside me as well and said that.
“A water pipe?”
If I had to answer, that was the closest thing in my knowledge…
“Eh? Meaning there might be water inside?”
“Nn, if it’s a water pipe, there might be…”
Before I could say “except it might not be water you can drink,” Alice took the wand out of her robe once more.
This time she only said softly,
“Elemental Explosion.”
?????