Chapter 148 “Superimposing?”
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A sleek, white figure zipped through the labyrinthine, decaying alleyways of the city’s underbelly, a realm tinged with grime and neglect. It soared gracefully over an intricate web of rusted pipes and complex pressure-release mechanisms that were tangled above an industrial hub of factories belching smoke. The mysterious entity continued its journey, sweeping over long-abandoned train stations and eerily empty streets before vanishing into a narrow, deteriorating back alley.
Out of nowhere, a fantastical explosion of otherworldly green flames blossomed in the atmosphere. These flames expanded in a pulsating manner as though forming a magical portal. Within the shimmering emerald fire, a swirling vortex undulated—contracting and expanding momentarily—before settling to allow Duncan to step through onto the dingy cobblestones.
Shirley, who appeared a bit disoriented and unsteady, followed closely behind him.
Duncan turned to assess her, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully as he took in her condition. “How are you feeling? Is anything causing you discomfort?” he asked, his voice tinged with a timbre of deep concern.
“I’m… I’m okay,” Shirley stammered, still trying to shake off her dizziness. Her disoriented state wasn’t so much from physical discomfort as it was from the dizzying speed at which Duncan had transported them. She glanced up and noticed Ai, now morphed back into a white dove, comfortably perched on Duncan’s shoulder. After a brief pause, she initiated a mental conversation with Dog, an entity secretly harbored within her soul. “Dog, do you think you can take on this dove?”
“Don’t even ask. The answer is a resounding no,” came Dog’s muffled voice. “Honestly, I wouldn’t stand a chance against even a fish if he decided to cook it up.”
Confused, Shirley blinked. “Why did the conversation suddenly switch to fish?”
“Because nothing about this guy seems to operate on any level of common sense,” Dog quickly replied.
Oblivious to Shirley and Dog’s mental dialogue, Duncan meticulously scrutinized Shirley’s condition once more. He also focused on sensing the state of the magical imprint he had left on her, and only then did he feel fully reassured.
In reality, Duncan had every reason to trust Ai’s capability to transport living beings securely. This trust wasn’t simply founded on his own prior successful experiences of being transported in his human form, but also on a plethora of “live experiments” Ai had conducted using various small animals. All trials had yielded flawless results, confirming that Ai could safely move living entities without causing harm. Nevertheless, Duncan felt it prudent to be extra cautious with this unpredictable and arcane “Bone Dove Express.”
Finally, Duncan’s eyes scanned their immediate surroundings. What he saw was an all-too-familiar sight: a desolate, crumbling alleyway framed by dilapidated buildings. At the far end of the alley, one could barely discern a rotting urban landscape. Archaic piping systems crisscrossed above them, connecting buildings on either side; a few joints sputtered and hissed, occasionally spewing minuscule jets of steam.
This was an all too common view in various sectors of the city’s lower district.
However, Shirley was quick to recognize their location.
“Is this… the Sixth District?” Her eyes widened in shock and curiosity. “Mr. Duncan, did you detect the manifestation of that magical imprint in this area?”
“Yes, we are indeed back in the Sixth District. However,” Duncan paused to take a deep breath, his brow lightly furrowing in concentration, “the signal from the magical imprint vanished roughly a minute ago.”
“It vanished? You mean it’s been extinguished?” Shirley’s face was a tapestry of surprise and concern.
Rather than answering directly, Duncan’s eyes narrowed as he focused intently in a specific direction. Inside the nebulous realm of Shirley’s “dreamscape,” he had left a minute flame anchored to the residual particles of their assailant. Duncan had commanded this magical fragment to journey back to its original body. But after Shirley’s dreamscape session concluded, he lost his link to that magical flame. Yet, just a short time ago, the elusive imprint resurfaced, directing him to their current location—the very real, very tangible Sixth District.
The riddle deepened. A flame, which should have been confined to the realm of dreams, had somehow sent signals in the physical world. The dreams of both Shirley and Nina appeared connected. Moreover, the umbrella-wielding entity that had assaulted Shirley in her dream had materialized in reality, specifically at a museum that had recently caught fire.
Bit by bit, Duncan felt a puzzle coming together in his mind, like disparate but interconnected pieces forming a coherent image. It was as if he were on the cusp of pulling back a mysterious veil that shrouded a deeper truth.
To be more accurate, this grand, mystical veil that seemed to cloak the entire city had a “gap” in it, and that gap was somewhere in this Sixth District—a place they had once visited but not fully explored.
His attention fixed on the last known area where he sensed the magical imprint. The aura of his flame had appeared but fleetingly, vanishing almost as quickly as it manifested. Still, Duncan believed the flame he had conjured wasn’t extinguished. Although he couldn’t ascertain its exact whereabouts, he felt it—burning more intensely than before.
If the magical flame still thrived and had grown stronger, then its mission was far from over. It was still in pursuit, still working to encase and assimilate whatever traces were left of their mysterious assailant. Its sudden appearance and equally sudden disappearance within the Sixth District could be due to an instability in the mysterious “veil” here—a transient opening and closing that permitted a brief interplay between the dream realm and the physical world.
He needed to find that fluctuating point of intersection, that elusive bridge between the dreamscape and reality.
Days after their initial foray, Duncan once again guided Shirley through the Sixth District’s desolate, decaying streets. This time, however, they bypassed the locals and headed directly toward the district’s most isolated region.
“The abandoned factory is that way,” Shirley noted midway, extending her arm to gesture toward a distant, looming structure.
“We’re not going to the factory this time,” Duncan responded tersely. “Our destination lies in this direction.”
“Oh…” Shirley’s voice trailed off, full of curiosity yet tinged with an apprehensive sense of anticipation for what lay ahead.
“Alright,” Shirley said, quickening her pace to match Duncan’s longer strides. As she walked, dry yellow leaves caught the wind and swirled around, coming to rest beneath her feet. Each step she took made a soft crunching sound, almost as if she was treading on brittle pieces of charred wood or stepping over the delicate embers of a dying fire.
Surveying her surroundings, she noticed only familiar, ordinary streets. Old houses lined both sides of the road, their timeworn facades standing resolute against the scattering leaves, seemingly oblivious to the unexpected intrusion of their quietude by Shirley and Duncan.
Then, something struck her as odd.
She realized that she hadn’t seen another soul since they entered this area. The Sixth District was always relatively quiet, with only the occasional listless resident making an appearance. But it had never been this vacant, not a single person in sight. It was unsettling, eerie even. A vague, creeping sensation welled up inside her, reminiscent of the same dread she’d felt in her haunting dreamscape experience. Instinctively, she moved closer to Duncan for reassurance, only to unexpectedly bump into his back when he suddenly came to a standstill.
For a brief second, her mind raced through a whirlwind of dark scenarios, including drafting her last will and envisioning various types of gravestones that could mark her untimely end. She soon reasoned, however, that if she were to be annihilated by interdimensional forces, she would likely not leave a corporeal remains for a grave.
“It looks like we’ve arrived,” Duncan’s tranquil voice broke through her momentary lapse into imaginative morbidity.
“I’m so, so sorry, I didn’t mean to—wait, what?” Shirley’s apologetic words tumbled out, faltering when she realized that Duncan wasn’t angered by her clumsiness. Only then did her eyes settle on the structure in front of them—a building long abandoned and disused.
It was a chapel.
Standing at the end of the narrow path was a community church, the type commonly found throughout the city-state of Pland. The edifice boasted slender spires characteristic of the Storm Church architectural style. Yet its grandeur had diminished over time; the black roof tiles and the white stone walls were shrouded in a veil of sagging, withered vines and layers of decaying filth. The ornate door, which once displayed intricate carvings and sacred runes, now hung slightly ajar, its former splendor tainted by the passage of time. Beside it, the stained-glass windows, which would have once displayed vibrant, heavenly scenes, were now shattered and twisted, their iron frames all that remained. Through these dilapidated apertures, a dark, dim interior could just barely be discerned.
The building, once a sanctuary, now exuded an atmosphere of decay and abandonment that seemed to have permeated every brick, every piece of stained glass, every inch of holy ground.
“Is this the ‘church’ that the elderly man near the intersection mentioned the last time we were here?” Shirley’s mind flicked back to their previous investigation in the Sixth District. “I recall he mentioned a nun lives here, but she’s often away.”
“‘Often not around’ seems like an understatement, given the condition of this place,” Duncan observed dryly as he walked toward the church’s partially opened door. “This looks less like a place where the nun is frequently absent and more like a sanctuary that’s been forgotten by time, maybe for a decade or so.”
Watching Duncan approach the dilapidated church, Shirley felt a shiver of trepidation. Her instincts told her to be wary of the decaying building before her, but after hesitating briefly, she pushed down her reservations and followed Duncan.
He nudged open the slightly ajar door, revealing the inner sanctum of the small church.
To Shirley’s astonishment, the church’s interior was a stark contrast to its outer shell of decay. The space was suffused with the warm glow of flickering candlelight, casting gentle shadows across meticulously arranged rows of pews. A statue of the Storm Goddess Gomona stood at the far end of the church, bathed in the soft luminescence, lending the space a sense of peaceful reverence.
A nun, who had been deep in prayer before the statue, turned her head at the creaking sound of the door opening. Upon spotting the newcomers, her face broke into a gentle smile.
“It’s been a long time since anyone visited this church,” she said, her voice tinged with a kind of melancholy joy.
“Ah… it seems we’ve come to the right place,” Duncan murmured, his expression inscrutable as he looked at the smiling nun. “A rift in the veil, as I suspected.”
Then he blinked.
The reality before them shifted in the fraction of a second that his eyes were closed and reopened. Once appearing as flesh and blood, the nun morphed into a mound of shifting, writhing ashes. The environment behind her presented an unsettling duality: flames roared and danced over the untouched wooden pews as though an inferno had erupted within the church, while at the same time, ashes and glowing embers rained down from the ceiling like some nightmarish snowfall. Two disparate scenes— one of a church ravaged by fire and another of its well-maintained, peaceful state— seemed to coexist and overlap, forming a bewildering and dissonant spectacle.
It was as if they were witnessing a collision of two completely different realities, each vying for dominance yet held together in a tenuous balance within the confines of this once-sacred space.
Ah, no wonder there haven’t been any children born in this district. Even if they look like humans, they’re all actually half-dead.
Also, dunno if this is what’s going to happen, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Duncan ends up usurping all the flames in the hidden conflagration. When the curtain is finally pulled back, they find the fire is burning green…
just realised the same thing
You know what, I’m so glad that Duncan can actually see through the illusion. Someone on the previous chapter mention that what if Nina is also ashes (referencing dog’s observation about her being surrounded by ash), but Duncan can see through the curtain so if that was the case he should’ve realized long ago, which means Nina is real. Well, the fact that he has a memory of saving Nina from the fire (which if he was affected by the illusion too, shouldn’t be possible) is already evidence enough, but still this puts me at ease.
Duncan’s ability to see reality as it is, is quite a useful power. My character of world(which I am still building) has an ability similar to his. For a long time I was thinking how the said character can use this ability, the overlapping of 2 different realities thing has given me quite a few ides(nascent as they may be).