Falling asleep is not too difficult after a busy day. Even lying on the floor does not prevent the brain from quickly adapting to a comfortable state and going to sleep.

The final stage of the process is generally difficult to detect by the subjective consciousness, and when you are drifting in a vague sense of falling, you have actually missed the best time to break free.

It was a feeling of losing one's attachment, and if you looked back closely, your back was still attached to a solid plane, and the motor receptors in the semicircular canals were constantly sending messages that your body was moving.

If I have to say, it is an abnormal sense of confusion, a mismatch between the positioning of the senses and oneself, and a space-like visual advance and substantial backwards.

Kraft opened his eyes, and the light of the candlestick had been extinguished, replaced by pure darkness.

Soft, continuous sounds came from outside, wave after wave, lapping against the façade of the building, rhythmic. The humidity in the air increases, and the moisture follows the rhythm of the tide and burrows into the room through the unsealed gaps, as if the building has been dragged directly to the waterfront.

At some point, a long flat square was stuffed in his hand, and a hazy sense of security urged him to fall back asleep.

The consciousness of having been prepared quickly compared with the last memory, and the next moment the body quietly moved out from under the bed, and the hand touched his pocket, where was the flint and steel prepared in advance.

However, along with the angular chunks, what was pulled out was a thin, tough card with what appeared to be some kind of familiar font on it.

The rehearsed process was not disrupted by unexpected clutter. Kraft walked over to the brazier of his memory and struck the flint, the splintering stone chips and flickering sparks splattered, leaping a few inches before rapidly expanding into a match-like fire.

Strips of cloth soaked in fish oil burned in the brazier, and the flames flickered, licking the firewood thrown into the basin, and the light grew, driving away the darkness from the floor to the beams.

At this point, Kraft finally had time to observe the two objects he was holding that should not have appeared.

On one side was a flat box with a black mirror, and a small blue-green card, on which the outline of a human figure was barely recognizable.

The bust's face on a white background melts and flows, like baked gelatin, dripping onto the buttoned yellow shirt and solidifying into waxy patches.

At first glance, it seems that the color of the picture has faded, but if you look closely, you will find that it is the same, the facial features are erased by the molten skin color blocks, losing the human form, and the silk sticks hang like a curtain.

There are several square-shaped block letters printed underneath, but the strokes and arrangement are shuffled and crooked. From a distance, it seems to be like that, and if you pay a little attention, you will perceive a plausible anomaly.

And the flat box Kraft felt that it was not the first time he had seen it, the same plausibility, and there was no further reaction when he pressed it.

Placing them on the pillow side of the bed, he picked up a torch and lit it in the brazier, and he went around the room, lighting the candlestick. Except for the inexplicable illegal items, no discrepancies with memories were found.

Special attention was paid to the location of the traps, and they all stayed where they were supposed to be. This relieved Kraft, who didn't want to step into a trap that would turn the two bones of his calf into four while he would act on his memory.

Pull open the door, bow your head and go around the chain and into the hallway. Looking down, instead of the stairs, the firelight reflected the road, the deep black water engulfed the path to the third floor, and the area that I knew by heart was unknown beneath the rippling scales of the water.

It was good to have a location in the attic, otherwise he would have been swimming in the dark waters downstairs by now. The time of ignorance when you wake up will cause water to pour into the unprepared alveoli, irritate the trachea and cause a violent cough, which will be further filled with more water and finally suffocated in the dark.

His limited diving experience is not enough to support him to find his way underneath, and oxygen cannot support the operation of his brain, and the more panicked he is, the greater the consumption, and the end of his life in the water. The back of the staircase has been cut off, and now only the windows on both sides of the attic are open to the outside.

This level also explains why there is a sound of water outside, the oscillating tide should be less than two meters below the windowsill, and the waves of water lap against the rough walls of earth and rock, and the gurgling sound of crushing foam bubbles is like the sound of phlegm in the trachea of a cocci infection.

Humans are probably never going to get used to these waters, where everything is as sick as a depigmented key card or a fake electronic device that turns on a white screen forever. It always remains roughly similar, and at the same time leaks differences in subtle ways, intentionally or unintentionally.

The streets are up to three storeys deep and have everything you need for marine life, not to mention sharks.

Kraft returned to his room, extinguished his torch, and covered the flames with the ashes from the brazier to control the burning a little. He suddenly found that it was a semi-confined space, with poor air circulation, the possibility of carbon monoxide poisoning was significant, and he couldn't open the windows to ventilate.

After the environmental observation was over, he retracted to the bottom of the bed with his sword, and the only thing left to do was to wait quietly.

The room was quiet again, save for the small crackle of sporadic debris from the burning carbon fire and the tireless lapping of water in the background.

Thoughts often come to mind when people are quiet, and Kraft remembers the few times he had hunted with his grandfather.

The Wood family's hunting was certainly different, and many times it was not for the sake of eating, but had to be carried out. The mountains behind them are inhabited by a large number of beasts that have not yet learned to respect these two-legged creatures, and when one of them visits too often, it must be removed.

Usually these tasks are carried out by the young men trained in the castle, but the hairy young man will inevitably mess things up, and the simple brain may not be as smart as a bear that has lived for a long time, and the momentum is good for scaring away small beasts, and the effect is about equal to none for the seasoned predator.

At this time, it was the turn of Old Wood himself to take the opportunity to move his muscles and lead the team on foot, and hike into the mountains and forests that ordinary hunting would never go deep.

They walk on deep layers of decaying leaves, clammy trunks covered with moss, ferns and miasma sprung out of the cracks.

Searching in the general direction in such a forest often requires patience, and like confrontation training, it consumes precious time and energy in silence and waits for the other side to leak the flaws that are bound to appear.

It could be a patch of moss torn apart along with the bark of a tree, a trail of an inverted fern from its stems and leaves, or the sound of a moist attachment that breaks the monotonous cycle in the sound of the tide.

Old Wood showed them how to break the jagged trap and place it on its favorite path, fastening the chain into the sturdy trunk of a tree, covering it with a thin layer of earth and camouflaged with dead leaves, lurking nearby.

Then, if nothing else, you'll clearly feel the approach of a creature much larger than you.

At first, I thought it was just a background sound that I was used to hearing, but the ripples followed one after another, and the liquid that was photographed high fell back into the water, no different from what I heard while waiting.

Then a beat didn't follow, the resonance split, the vortex swirled, the dark tide surged upward, breaking through the water layer above, and the separated sea water streaked across the smooth skin, as if avoiding something that didn't exist.

In the sense of hearing, it is the disappearance of a part of the sound of water for no reason, a mysterious vacancy appears under the windowsill, and the sound disappears.

The grunting beat is replaced by a rising musical note, and the high and low voices play in unison, each with cascading echoes, gentle and urgent, and the chorus of countless vocal cords, with slender cavities providing resonance and modification, forming a wave of sound.

Kraft held his breath and climbed out of bed, picking up a can of fish oil. He may have to suffer from concert PTSD for a long time after he goes back, but fortunately there is only a church choir in Wenden Port, so he will not go to St. Simon's Square to feed the seagulls in the future.

The singing was high, and the light was bright.

The constant and soft white light, which is breathingly bright and faded, gradually adjusts and stabilizes, changing from viscous and rich color to natural light that is close to light white, and is unusually bright.

A few rays of white light leaking through the cracks in the wood stuck to the wall, overwhelmingly overpowering the warm colors of the brazier illumination, signaling its arrival.

The music raises again, and the penetration is even more penetrating, muffling the screeching sound of the teeth on the flesh whiskers grasping at the cracks in the stone. Wet and heavy limbs stretch out alternately, built-in joints bend and twist, muscles contract, the main body rises from the water, the water film slides down from above like a waterfall, and the sound of dense water droplets is like a rain shower.

Eventually, all the sounds stopped outside the window, and the seductive white light that tended to stabilize shone into the room through the cracks in the window, and there was a desire to open it at first sight.

Through a layer of windows, it is waiting for its unknown prey to open the window to greet it.

It's a kind of anglerfish feeling, and the simple but surprisingly useful routine of lighting up is very few people can refuse such a reassuring and wonderful light source when they wake up in the middle of the night, but alas, there is one here.

Flicking the oil pot in his hand, Kraft took two more steps to the side, dodging the direct white light. More than once he felt that this light was infinitely close to the most perfect moonlight he could think of, so bright and bright that he could not help but give birth to an uncontrollable affection.

This must not be as simple as simple light, but mixed with a special attraction mechanism that can be effective on humans, and the anglerfish take advantage of the phototaxis of deep-sea creatures.

From a certain point of view, this can be good news, as the creatures that like to hunt in this way have more or less motor defects, either not fast enough, not agile enough, or not moving at all.

After all, the human locomotion system is human, and it has not been considered that it can bear several times the weight load on a normal basis, and there is a limit no matter how much it is optimized. Thinking backwards, maybe it is not that it originally lived in water, but that it took this locomotion system and could only reduce the force in the water most of the time?

His guess was probably right, the angle of the white light was slightly skewed, and the thing outside couldn't even hold steadily against the wall for a long time, and his posture had to be adjusted. This gave him a lot of confidence.

However, it was not the silent confrontation that changed first, as keen hearing noticed the sudden cessation of the tide outside the window on the other side behind him, and the sound of a moist and viscous clinging sound that had just been tasted sounded.

[I'm afraid its scientific name has to be plural]