Chapter 135: Does a Centenarian's Infertility Count as Reproductive Isolation from Humans? |
This was the troupe leader's office.
It was a small office, with only a sofa, a small tea table, one desk, two chairs, a bookcase, and a few knickknacks on the desk.
Compared to the troupe's overall splendor, the office looked much more modest.
That had nothing to do with Samuel trying to appear ascetic, it was simply that the original decorators didn't know his taste and therefore didn't decorate the place for him.
And after the room was finished, lazy Samuel couldn't be bothered to redecorate it.
Samuel walked straight to the desk as soon as he entered, casually pulled a chair out and sat, then pointed to the sofa for Falson to sit wherever he liked.
"Make yourself at home, sit wherever."
"Alrighty." Falson nodded in agreement, went to the sofa, greeted Celt, and sat down.
It was his first time meeting Celt; the last time he came to the theater to drop off his resume he had only seen Samuel.
So he guessed this person must be the troupe's deputy leader.
Noticing Falson's gaze, Celt seemed to know what he was thinking, and shook his head with a smile.
"I'm not the deputy leader."
Ah, wrong guess.
"We don't have the concept of a deputy leader here, nobody wants to be deputy leader, it's too much trouble," Celt explained.
Really?
"Then you don't care about power?" Falson asked curiously.
"Power?" Celt echoed the word, unable to suppress a light laugh, "Why would we need that?"
Uh... so they really didn't need it?
This troupe's atmosphere might be even better than he imagined.
For a moment, Falson's mood lifted considerably.
Seeing Falson seated, Samuel turned and looked at Celt on the other side of the sofa.
"By the way, the troupe should be almost done decorating, right? When can it open?" he asked Celt.
Celt casually closed his book and put it on the small tea table in front of him, looking at Samuel with a helpless expression.
"Why would you ask me that? You're the troupe leader..."
"Huh? Am I?" Samuel leaned back in his chair, "Oh, right, I am."
"Tsk, we should find a chance to outsource the troupe leader position."
"That's a loud 'tsk', and how could you possibly outsource something like that?"
"Yeah, right." Samuel slouched in the swivel chair and let it carry him left and right, "If only some man about 1.85 meters tall with golden vertical pupils and black hair who likes raising jellyfish would take over for me."
Celt lifted Sereia from his head and cradled her in his arms.
"You should ask Evina, I think she'd be interested."
"She's probably just training dogs."
"Still, someone has to handle the business."
Falson, sitting on the sofa, watched Celt's movements and was momentarily surprised, not understanding why Celt made a random "take off hat" motion.
But he quickly realized that maybe Celt had been holding something on his head that Falson couldn't see.
It reminded him of the last time in Liant Town—back then it had been the same: Grill suddenly looked in a certain direction and said something had appeared, and then Samuel and Evina vanished.
Only after he followed a System prompt and activated his spiritual sight did he notice there had been a jellyfish in the dining hall.
Thinking of that, he gathered his Spirituality to his eyes and turned on spiritual sight.
As expected, Celt had indeed been holding something, and now it lay on his lap, cradled in his arms.
It was the same jellyfish he had seen before.
Cute and quiet, she sat peacefully in Celt's arms, occasionally poking him with a tentacle.
Sensing Falson's stare, Sereia turned her attention to him, waved a tentacle at the human, and greeted him.
Falson raised a hand and waved back in response.
He had met Sereia before, so he wasn't surprised by a flying jellyfish.
On the contrary, after spending about ten minutes with her previously, he had found her quite adorable.
His gaze rose to Celt.
So this was Miss Sereia's caretaker?
Because he hadn't activated spiritual sight before, Falson hadn't immediately seen Sereia at first; he only had the faint feeling that Celt had something on his head but could not make it out clearly.
Even Law Seekers, without opening spiritual sight, couldn't see soul-structured life forms.
This limitation applied to Law Seekers who had only one or two Law Marks and whose Law Marks had been held for only a few or a dozen years.
If a person had accumulated enough Law Marks, or had been a Law Seeker long enough, they could see soul-structured life with the naked eye.
The former was because the many Law Marks had altered both body and spirit; the latter was simply because prolonged exposure to Law Marks had changed them enough to be noticeably different from normal humans.
At the Orlis Institute, some scholars even claimed that Law Seekers who gained naked-eye soul-vision via the second route had already become reproductively isolated from humans, effectively constituting a different species.
They conducted numerous experiments, collecting over a dozen Law Seekers older than sixty who each bore a single Law Mark, and confirmed that they indeed could not reproduce with ordinary humans.
That scholar was later expelled from the Orlis Institute.
Both sides stuck to their positions: the scholar insisted the institute was jealous and unwilling to admit such a monumental discovery.
Other researchers said they couldn't stomach sharing a lab with the man who wanted to conduct breeding experiments involving a dozen elderly people aged eighty to nearly one hundred, fearing it would affect their intelligence.
But then again, if centenarians cannot reproduce, doesn't that count as reproductive isolation from younger humans?