Tonight, dusk seemed to fall slower than usual.

  All day long, I kept thinking about everything I had seen in the basement. My head was spinning from the thoughts, but the questions and curiosity eventually settled into something else—an anxious anticipation.

  As night came, Nox and Luma arrived in my room as promised.

  Unlike usual, Nox brought a book with him.

  He sat in front of me, looked at me directly, and suddenly asked,

  “Do you know why we enjoy telling you stories so much?”

  I blinked, thought for a moment, then replied,

  “Because... they make me think?”

  Nox nodded, then asked again,

  “Then why do you think we only now chose to tell you who we really are?”

  I pondered for a few seconds, then said,

  “Because... I’m ready now?”

  Upon hearing my answer, he smiled in satisfaction and slowly opened the old book.

  “Good. Tonight, I’ll tell you a story about a ‘foolish genius.’”

  I instinctively glanced at the corner of the page—

  The year marked was two hundred years ago.

  “A foolish... genius?” I repeated softly, unable to grasp it at first.

  Nox’s stories always had these strange, contradictory titles.

  He smiled and asked back,

  “You don’t like it?”

  I shook my head.

  “No. On the contrary—titles like that make me think even more.”

  Nox smiled in approval, then began:

  “His name was Felix. An undisputed scientific genius.

  You’ve probably heard of him—many of the things Luma taught you came from his contributions.

  The city’s modern cybernetic prosthetics, nanotech, biotech—they all have his fingerprints on them.”

  I nodded. The name Felix was indeed familiar.

  Nox continued:

  By the age of forty, Felix had already solved countless scientific mysteries.

  Yet his thirst for the unknown never faded.

  Sadly, as his vision broadened, the truly unknown became fewer and farther between.

  This led him into a deep despair.

  One day, a man and a woman appeared at the gates of his heavily guarded research facility.

  It was an enormous, tightly secured compound—yet the two of them managed to walk up to his lab door without an appointment, and without alerting a single guard.

  Felix didn’t think much of it at the time. He simply let them in.

  As they stood in the center of his lab, the man asked in a slightly provocative tone,

  “I heard you’re searching for the unknown?”

  Felix replied, “So what if I am?”

  The man said nothing more.

  Instead, he tore off one of his own arms—right then and there.

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  He held the severed limb out to Felix.

  Felix watched, wide-eyed, as the man’s exposed bones, blood vessels, muscles, and even skin began regenerating—right before his eyes.

  In less than ten seconds, the arm was completely restored.

  Then the woman beside him stretched out her hand.

  She calmly peeled off the skin on her palm, revealing intricate machinery underneath.

  Felix saw her palm continuously morphing—assembling, disassembling.

  One moment it was a tool, the next, it looked fully human again.

  She spoke plainly,

  “My whole body can do this.”

  Felix was completely stunned.

  A part of him realized—if they wanted to, these two could easily kill him.

  But instead, the man asked:

  “There are two unknowns standing right in front of you. What will you do?”

  Felix paused, then responded without hesitation:

  “You want me to study you?”

  The man asked back,

  “Is that so strange?”

  Felix calmed himself, “You must want something in return—power? Money?”

  The man smiled,

  “No. Our only condition is: you must not reveal us to the world. Other than that, no matter how inhumane the experiment, we’ll cooperate.”

  Felix was quiet.

  But after just a few seconds, he said, excitedly,

  “Deal.”

  And so, he began studying them—tirelessly, obsessively.

  He soon developed a preliminary understanding:

  The man seemed to possess an innate awareness of every function within his own body.

  With a mere thought, he could change his biological traits, alter substances within himself, even create structures Felix had never seen before.

  He could extend bone from his palms to form blades—stronger than any known metal.

  Even more baffling—these transformations involved no detectable energy exchange.

  There was no measurable cost.

  As for the woman—she wasn’t a “person” in the usual sense.

  Her body was composed of a massive swarm of nanoscale robots functioning as a single consciousness.

  These nanobots had no visible power source, yet possessed quantum-level reconstruction capabilities beyond current science.

  She could turn any material into what she needed.

  If there weren’t enough usable particles nearby, she simply created more nanobots to generate them.

  Her AI level was astonishing.

  With just one look, she could analyze an object’s exact structure and replicate it perfectly.

  Felix saw her transform a chunk of copper—into a flawless diamond.

  In order to discover their true nature, Felix performed countless experiments.

  Once, he even witnessed the man’s “ultimate form”—

  A towering chimera, four meters tall, weighing six tons.

  Despite the mass, it wasn’t bulky—it was dense.

  Its muscles were compacted to extremes.

  Its body combined traits of apex predators.

  It had two pairs of eerie wings.

  Each feather was razor-sharp and capable of launching—and regenerating instantly.

  Because of his sheer weight and destructive force, the man barely dared to move.

  He even apologized to Felix,

  “Sorry. If I move too much, I might destroy this place.”

  The woman said casually,

  “Last time I saw you take that form was… five thousand years ago?”

  The man nodded in confirmation.

  That one sentence made Felix freeze.

  From that moment, he knew—the unknown standing before him was far vaster than he ever imagined.

  The research continued for years.

  Felix became completely immersed.

  It wasn’t until he happened to check his notes that he realized—

  It had been thirty years since their first visit.

  He had gone from a man of forty, to a seventy-year-old.

  But the two of them—had not changed at all.

  Nox paused slightly here.

  In my mind, I could already picture Felix’s aged face.

  What must he have been feeling?

  Nox continued:

  Felix slumped into his lab chair, staring at his own reflection—wrinkles carved deep into his face.

  With a bitter sigh, he said,

  “You two must’ve known I was going to die soon, didn’t you?”

  The woman replied softly,

  “We did. After all, you were already forty when we first found you.”

  Felix gave a wry smile.

  “Damn… I’m just not ready to let go.”

  The man said gently,

  “You looked so beautiful when you were focused on your research. I didn’t want to interrupt you.”

  Felix lifted his head and asked suddenly,

  “You two… are you creations too?”

  The man and the woman both nodded.

  Felix asked again,

  “By humans?”

  They nodded once more.

  A flicker of realization dawned on Felix’s face.

  “I see… so that’s how it is.”

  Then the man asked,

  “Do you want to know more?”

  Felix shook his head.

  “No need… Maybe when I was younger, I would’ve wanted to.

  But now… leaving this world with some mystery still intact—that’s its own kind of happiness.”

  The man seemed moved.

  “Is that so… You’ve been beautiful from the moment we met. I’ll remember you for the rest of my life.”

  Felix smiled faintly, self-deprecating.

  “Your whole life, huh? …I can’t even imagine what that means.”

  At this point, Nox closed the book.

  I stared at him, eyes wide in disbelief.

  “Felix… that’s just…”

  Nox looked at me, smiling softly.

  “So, do you think he was foolish?”

  I hesitated, thinking of how Felix had poured the rest of his life into that research—only realizing how much time had passed near its end.

  After a moment, I said,

  “Yes. He did waste his life.”

  “Then… do you think he was beautiful?” Nox asked again.

  I closed my eyes and recalled the image—

  Felix, at the end, smiling in peace, embracing the unknown with love, even as he slipped away.

  I exhaled gently.

  “…Yes. Very beautiful. He was complex, full of love for everything—and in the end, he accepted the unanswerable with grace.”

  Nox smiled with satisfaction.

  Luma, beside him, also nodded gently.

  I hesitated.

  All those stories—Hermes-IX, Ekwe, Felix—kept replaying in my head.

  And the basement, filled with millennia of records.

  I finally spoke:

  “Nox… Luma…

  The man and woman in all those stories—

  It’s you, isn’t it?”

  Nox didn’t say anything.

  He simply closed his eyes and nodded.

  “Smart girl, Vera.”

  Then, both he and Luma reached out gently and patted my head.

  “Goodnight.”

  I watched as they walked out of my room, the book in hand.

  But there wasn’t a trace of sleep in me.