The Crown Prince In Hiding

Chapter 26

Bayern

Mathema University

A university for magical engineering and natural sciences.

For anyone expecting something magnificent — disappointment was waiting for them.

What stood before them were solid, blocky buildings arranged in connected clusters, clearly divided into Zones A, B, C, and D. Walkways between them. Concrete. Stone-paved floors. Windows that looked straight through into lecture halls.

It looked like any ordinary university.

Large — but with nothing spectacular about it whatsoever.

”The exterior may not be as beautiful as Artheris, but I can guarantee there is far more to see inside.”

When it came to architecture, the people of Mathema had no use for aesthetics.

They were nothing like the people of Luminus, who designed everything to be beautiful — who carved columns into graceful curves and obsessed over every last detail.

For Mathema, beauty meant function.

Bland and featureless as the exterior appeared, Mathema University had been ranked by the World Engineering Organization as the most perfectly disaster-proof structure on the planet.

That meant no matter what occurred — a natural disaster, a wildfire, a tsunami, or even a landslide from the very mountain the city stood upon — not a single building in Mathema University would suffer even a trace of structural collapse. If a creature the size of Iskaryx came and perched on the roof, the building would not so much as shudder.

Stepping inside, Dan found that every corner, every turn, had been designed for efficiency — to move students between buildings in the shortest time possible. All four corners of each building featured emergency exits that could be reached with ease and led immediately outside in the event of a fire.

The ceilings were higher than those of Artheris, thanks to master engineers who had designed the ventilation pathways and interior air circulation systems, and positioned reflective surfaces at angles that bounced natural light throughout the building — so regardless of where the sun sat in the sky, the interior remained consistently and evenly lit from morning to evening.

The people of Mathema placed aesthetics last. They always considered the functional performance of a building before anything else — structural load-bearing capacity over walls carved with mythological murals.

They considered such things useless, and this was also something Mathema’s people took pride in saying about themselves.

They believed this difference in mindset made them superior to other peoples.

That said, if one were to ask whether they had no capacity for artistic creation at all — the answer would be no.

One look at Blackwood Bank, or the hotel Fury was staying in, made it plain that when Mathema wanted to, they absolutely could. But beauty there was a tool for attracting outside investors — and therefore, it counted as function.

”I heard that every building in Mathema has something done to it so that during an earthquake, they don’t collapse.”

”Is that true, Nora? How is that even possible?”

Nora shrugged — she didn’t know. Dan sounded genuinely amazed. And of course he was, because what Nora was describing had only just been invented in this world.

It was a massive spring system beneath each building — a damper.

”We’ve arrived, Mr. Dan. This is our department.”

Mathema Paleontology Institution.

Stepping inside, the first impression was that this place felt like an office.

Brown tones. Unremarkable.

Nora caught the smell of earth that seemed to hang over everything.

Researchers and workers moved back and forth throughout the space.

A worker pushed a cart loaded with slabs of cliff-face rock, freshly chiseled from somewhere, fossils embedded within — rolling past Dan without a second glance.

And naturally, the department’s entrance displayed a portrait of its founder — a painted likeness of a man in an old-fashioned suit, his hair a wild shock of white.

”This is Mr. Francis. He founded this institution fifty years ago.”

Professor Pi’erre said,

”Mr. Francis was raised in a wealthy merchant family. Throughout his life he had a deep passion for collecting ancient creature remains, and so he built this place to preserve them in the best possible condition. Before he passed, he entrusted the building to the university and donated his entire fossil collection for the benefit of anyone who wished to study them.”

From there the institution had grown steadily — until it fell quiet during the years of war.

When the war ended and the world entered an era of competing to rebuild, the department saw its funding cut. The building had aged visibly since — signs of wear and grime had settled into the walls along every corridor Dan walked through.

But all of that was about to change, now that it had come into the hands of a new patron.

Prince Fury of Diablo.

The young man stood looking at the portrait of the founder.

He had never heard the name Francis before.

But he felt it himself, without needing to be told —

Whatever this man had left behind, he would see it carried forward with the greatest care.

Along the walls, glass cases displayed countless bone fragments, each accompanied by a description of its origin.

Dan knew immediately that he could not possibly see everything in a single day.

The bones on display were all specimens that had been cleared for public viewing — verified and approved for exhibition.

But what Dan could access, as the project’s patron, beyond what was available to the general public —

were the specimens not yet made public, kept secured in the basement below.

The hydraulic lift opened.

A single button sat on the panel.

Professor Pi’erre pressed it.

The mechanical workings of the lift engaged with the sound of pistons, and they descended slowly into the lower levels of the structure.

The air grew slightly cooler. Nora felt it.

”Are there more specimens stored underground than on display upstairs?”

Dan asked,

”Why is that? Why keep them down here?”

Professor Benneth answered with quiet patience.

”There are several reasons.”

The first was limited display space.

The second was environmental control. Certain specimens were extremely fragile and could deteriorate if exposed to sunlight, humidity, or fluctuating temperatures. Underground storage allowed temperature and moisture to be held far more stable than the exhibition floor above, where people moved constantly throughout the day.

The third was security. Some specimens were of immeasurable value and completely irreplaceable — the only physical evidence confirming the existence of certain beings. The possibility of theft or loss could not be tolerated under any circumstances.

He understood that last reason immediately.

The hydraulic lift reached the bottom.

The cage doors opened.

And what Dan saw before him —

was a bleached white room lined on both sides, as far as the eye could follow, with lockers, drawers, and cabinets — all the same stark white. No specimens were exposed to the open air. The ventilation system regulated humidity throughout. And every drawer, cabinet, and locker was sealed with a combination mechanism like a bank safe.

”This isn’t at all what I imagined...”

”What did you imagine, Mr. Dan?”

”...I thought I’d see bones laid out in rows — something like...”

”That simply isn’t possible.”

Professor Pi’erre then pulled open one of the drawers for Dan to see.

As it slid out, he found the specimen inside was —

”A fish?”

Dan and Nora leaned in for a closer look.

An ordinary-looking fish preserved in a slab of hard dark brown material. Its scales were noticeably larger than those of any fish commonly seen today.

”It looks like a regular fish.”

”It was alive two hundred and fifty million years ago.”

Dan went still.

”There weren’t even humans yet, were there?”

”Fish were among the very first living creatures to appear. They came long before mammals — the gap is so vast it’s almost beyond comparison.”

The Professor continued,

”Every bone, every specimen is catalogued here. Each one is assigned its own number, and every published research paper references the specimen numbers held in this collection.”

Beyond that, this was also a place researchers from across the world traveled to — to observe and study a collection of more than one hundred thousand specimens.

”One hundred thousand?”

Dan raised an eyebrow.

”A hundred thousand pieces?”

He thought that was an enormous number.

But when Professor Pi’erre revealed the following fact, Prince Fury was left completely stunned.

”Every specimen ever discovered since the existence of humanity amounts to less than one percent of what we believe actually existed out there.”

”One percent?”

”And that is being extremely generous.”

This may have been the single sentence that struck Fury most deeply today — in the sheer, incomparable scale of what could only be called the journey of life — unless one counted what the Professor was about to explain next.

”You cannot begin to imagine how difficult it is for a specimen to survive long enough to reach our hands.”

Because when a specimen died in the ancient past, time moved on.

If it did not die near a body of water, a desert, or a volcano, then one could nearly guarantee that nothing of it would remain — no part preserved by nature, not a single trace.

When one looked back at oneself with the same standard, it became clear that most of us do not live in environments that favor preservation.

And neither did more than ninety-nine percent of those who came before.

”Take a forest, for example.”

On the right side of the world map: northern Zentinel.

That was the location of the largest forest in the world — the lungs of the planet, producing over twenty percent of the world’s oxygen.

The Arrowhead Forest.

It covered more than half of the remaining rainforest on the planet and was the largest and most biodiverse tropical rainforest in the world.

The key word being: most biodiverse in the world.

”Because for all that biodiversity, everything that dies there is broken down and consumed entirely — not a single specimen survives.”

Or consider southern Zentinel, which today was desert — but a hundred million years ago had been open ocean.

And even if a creature there had become a specimen and survived to the present day, the location where that specimen lay buried might have shifted entirely through the movement of tectonic plates — sliding beneath a city, driven under a mountain, or pushed somewhere human hands could never reach to excavate.

Some of them died on land that became Snowhaven — in an age before a single mountain existed. Today, with hundreds of ice-capped peaks rising into the clouds, those ancient remains were likely sleeping somewhere within them. Or pressed down toward the earth’s core, crushed under immense pressure until nothing remained.

And so, when considered this way, it became clear that sometimes — the full existence of those who came before us was a past that could never be looked back upon.

We would never know what they looked like.

The largest specimen ever found may have been no more than an ordinary creature in its own time. Others stranger, larger, may have lived alongside it — and we simply had not found them. And perhaps we never would, because of the natural barrier known as time.

To explain it all would take far longer than a single day.

But what they had brought Dan here to see was something that could answer the question left unresolved from before.

”Let’s pick up where we left off. Do you remember, Dan?”

”...Yes. I remember.”

The question had been this:

If lungs were what we gained from moving onto land, then in the era when life had only just climbed out of the water — how did gills become lungs?

”In truth... lungs were not actually the most difficult part of the transition from water to land.”

The black handle turned.

A drawer slid open — and Dan saw what lay within.

Coelacanths.