Chapter 16

Su Yao's Dazzling Counterattack Chapter 16

The Greenland ice sheet stretched to the horizon, a vast white expanse that hurt the eyes even through sunglasses. Su Yao pulled her parka tighter, its fur trim crunching with frost, as she followed Maliina, an Inuit elder, across the snow. Their boots left deep prints that filled with powdery snow almost immediately, like the land was erasing their passage. "Seal hunting is not sport," Maliina said, her breath forming a white cloud. The system's translation module struggled with her Greenlandic dialect, but the gravity of her words came through clearly. "It is survival. The fur keeps us warm. The meat feeds us. To waste it is to dishonor the animal."

They'd come to a settlement outside Ilulissat, where the Inuit community had been weaving seal fur into parkas for generations. The "Threads Without Borders" team's mission: merge that fur with their seaweed-metal fabric to create coats that could withstand -50°C temperatures, while respecting the community's traditions. But first, they had to earn trust.

Maliina's grandson, Aputsiaq, showed them his workshop—a small wooden hut heated by a soapstone stove, its walls lined with drying seal pelts. "My father taught me to scrape the fat off with a ulu," he said, holding up a curved blade. "Too much, and the fur falls out. Too little, and it stinks. Like most things, it's about balance." He demonstrated, his hands moving with the slow confidence of someone who'd done this a thousand times, the pelt softening under his touch.

Su Yao's team had brought samples of their seaweed-metal blend, but it brittle in the cold, cracking when folded. "It needs to be more like skin," Maliina said, running a finger over the fabric. "Flexible. Like it knows the cold is coming."

For a week, they experimented. Aputsiaq suggested treating the metal fibers with seal oil, rubbing it into the fabric until it glistened. "My mother does this to our boots," he said. "Keeps the ice out, keeps the warmth in." The result was a material that bent like leather, even in freezing temperatures.

Fiona, shivering despite her thermal layers, added Inuit embroidery patterns—stitching tiny narwhals and polar bears into the seams, their outlines visible only when the fabric moved. "My grandmother's Fair Isle patterns tell stories of the sea," she said. "Yours tell stories of the ice. They belong together."

Tensions flared when a animal rights group caught wind of the project, sending angry emails: "How dare you promote seal hunting?" Su Yao invited their representative to visit the settlement, where Maliina took her out on the ice, pointing to a seal basking on a floe. "This animal feeds 10 families," she said. "We thank it before we hunt. We use every part. Who are you to call that cruel?" The representative left in silence, later issuing a public apology.

On the day they finished the first prototype—a parka with seal fur trim, seaweed-metal panels, and embroidery that seemed to shift in the light—Aputsiaq's daughter, 8-year-old Nuliajuk, insisted on testing it. She ran outside, rolling in the snow, then stood, grinning. "I'm not cold!" she shouted, her breath visible. "Not even my toes!"

That night, the community held a feast in their honor—seal stew, dried Arctic char, and a cake iced with blueberries. Maliina presented Su Yao with a parka, its lining stitched with a message in Inuktitut: "We walk the same ice."

As they flew back to Marrakech, Su Yao pressed her forehead to the plane window, watching the Greenland ice fade into blue. The parka lay across her lap, still smelling of seal oil and snow. She thought of Maliina's words: "The cold teaches us to rely on each other. No one survives alone."

The system was a distant memory now, but its lesson lived on—in the fabric, in the collaborations, in the quiet understanding that the world was full of teachers, if you were brave enough to listen.

Somewhere, a new thread was already being woven.