The next day, D’Artagno and his team started going out to retrieve the ‘selkie tears’.

They had found underwater ruins where a very large number of selkie tears existed in clusters. Although the location is known, D’Artano said that it is not easy to retrieve the selkie tears from the deep underwater ruins, and that it would take days or even weeks.

While D’Artano and his team are out at sea, Sophia was at home on the isolated island where they are based.

She is not bored, as D’Artano has shown her around the cave, so while she waited, she can gather native berries and fruits, and swim in the spring with its warm water.

The spring with the warm water gushing out was particularly fun. It’s not that wide, but it’s so deep that you don’t even know where the bottom is. She was warned by D’Artagno not to dive in there because it was dangerous.

Around the shallows of the hot spring, there are a lot of crystals lying around, about the size of a pinky finger.

D’Artagno and his friends, who had many more expensive items, were not interested in these crystals, but they were interesting enough for Sophia, and in the process of collecting them, a mountain of crystals formed on the bank of the spring..

She hadn’t decided what to do with the pile of crystals, but the pile, sparkling and reflecting the light, looked like a jewellery box and was very attractive. She was satisfied staring at them.

And so it was one day when she was killing time until D’Artano and the others returned. Sophia headed for the fountain as usual and stopped when she spotted something dark in the hot spring. At first she thought it was a tree floating on the Spring, but it was moving from the centre of the fountain towards the shore.

‘A Seal?…’

It looked like a seal.

It might run away if she got too close, so Sophia hid behind a tree and waited to see what was happening, but the seal reached the shore and…

“What!?”

Sofia almost screamed out but quickly held her mouth with her palms.

When the seal reached the shore, it surprisingly changed into a human form.

The Seal was a woman with strangely coloured hair, a mixture of gold and blue. She stood on the shore and sang a short song, then threw a small piece of crystal in her hand into the spring. Then she entered the Spring again, transformed into a seal and dove to the bottom of the Spring.

Sophia stood there for a while, unable to believe what she had just seen, but eventually headed around the woman’s board and looked into the fountain.

‘… Is it possible that all these crystals were thrown by that person?’

The crystals sparkling in the water. If they were thrown in by her for a reason, it was probably a bad idea to pick them up.

Sophia decided to throw the crystals that had been piled up on the shore back into the Spring. As she threw them into the spring little by little, she found something else in the spring, different from the crystals.

When she picked it up and looked at it, she saw that it was a teardrop-shaped stone with a deep blue colour.

Sophia, curious, picked it up and decided to take it back to the cave where D’Artano and his family lived.

‘Isn’t this a selkie tear?’

When he showed D’Artano the blue stone he had picked up on his return from the sea, D’Artano couldn’t believe it.

“Are these tears of selkie that you and your friends go to pick up every day?”

“Yeah. Where did you get this?”

“I saw it in the spring. I only found one, though.”

“Huh. I was wondering how far that spring goes, but maybe it goes all the way to the sea.”

“You flowed from the sea?”

“I don’t know, maybe.”

D’Artagno returned the selkie tears to Sophia.

“You found it, you keep it.”

“You don’t mind?”

“No, it’s yours if you found it.”

Is that what it’s supposed to be? But D’Artagno told her to keep it, so Sophia kept it in her pocket. “I’ll keep it in the shelf in the captain’s cabin, where I’ll be sleeping later.” she said.

“So D’Artano, what are you and the others going to do with all those selkie tears?”

“Sell them.”

“Sell them?”

“Yeah. Even if you keep it as a stone, its not good for our health. So I will sell it and exchange it for money”

It was true that it was easier and more convenient to convert them into gold coins than to keep them as jewels. It seemed a bit wasteful, but according to D’Artagno, the value of jewellery fluctuates from time to time, and selkie tears are currently traded at a very high price, so that was the time to sell them.

“Let’s have dinner instead of talking about this. We’ve stocked up on some top quality meat!” D’Artagno said, and the pirates bursted into a frenzy, and a barbecue party started in the cave.

While Sophia was eating the meat D’Artagno had given her, the barbecue party had already started. She told him about the selkie’s tears, but failed to tell him about the mysterious seal, but decided to forget about it, as she would never see the Seal again.

The next day however, when Sophia went to the spring, the seal came again, just like yesterday. The seal changed into human form on the shore, sings a short song, threw a crystal into the spring and left.

After the seal was gone, Sophia looked into the Spring and found one selkie tear.

‘There it is again. . . Could this be just a coincidence?’

The selkie is one of Scotland’s mythical gods. According to the myth, the selkie takes the form of a seal when it lives underwater, and when it comes ashore it sheds its seal skin and changes into human form. In this world, selkies are supposed to be fairies, and their existence, including whether they are real, is shrouded in mystery, but could what Sofia saw earlier have been a selkie?

Sophia clutched the selkie’s tears and continued to stare for a while at the area where the seal had dived into and disappeared.