Chapter 101

Chapter 101: The Open-Minded Alice

Duncan stared at Alice with a blank face, as if he were looking at an idiot.

The echo of history in his mind had not fully faded yet. The calm, all-seeing eyes of the Frostholm Queen from half a century ago still lingered in his thoughts. But that solemn afterimage, which should have filled him with heavy feelings, now smashed right into Alice, this idiot Doll. The clash did not only grind it to pieces, it even started to twist it into a joke under the repeated “pop-pop-pop” of her pulling off her own head.

He watched her like that for quite a while before finally losing his patience: “…What are you doing?”

“Ah! Captain!” Alice finally reacted, late as always. She hurried to hold her head with one hand and looked at Duncan. “Oh, I keep feeling like some hairs are stuck in the joint of my neck…”

Duncan’s face stayed blank: “If you yank it off a couple more times, you’ll have to give the new hair a name again.”

“I already did! If it falls out, they’ll be called the Williams family…”

Duncan used all his strength to keep his expression under control and stopped himself from throwing this Doll out of the cabin.

After a few seconds, he let out a long breath. His mood slowly calmed down.

To be fair, Alice’s presence had indeed brought some much-needed cheer to the dead, gloomy atmosphere on the Vanished. But sometimes she brought too much cheer… Even Goathead often could not keep up with this Doll’s pace. As for Duncan, most of the time he had no idea what kind of structure was inside this thing’s skull.

It might even be solid.

Duncan’s gaze slid over Alice, and he could not help recalling the “echo” he had just seen in that dark space. His expression grew serious, and the details in that echo made him frown.

He was sure that he had seen the Frostholm Queen, Ray Nora, the one who was said to have been executed by rebels half a century ago. She was the “original” mentioned in the background information of Anomaly 099, the one this Doll Alice was modeled after. He had seen the scene of her “execution”, and the cause of that scene no doubt lay in the “Doll’s spirit coffin” before him.

The spirit form fire had linked him to the spirit coffin.

But what was the nature of those images? Was the spirit coffin consciously showing him something? Were they passive “recordings”? Were they the memories of Anomaly 099? Were they real fragments of history, or distorted “visions” with some kind of correction mixed in?

In his mind, he saw again the calm look of that young Queen when she gazed at him, and he recalled her soft request—

“Whoever you are, please do not corrupt history.”

Who was that line meant for? Was it really meant for him? Did those words truly cross time itself? Or was it only an illusion drawn by the spirit coffin, reacting to his “visit” in some way? And after the Queen said those words, a frightened voice under the guillotine had asked her who she was talking to…

Those linked reactions had all felt so real. So real they sent a chill down his spine.

As for the end of that “echo”, the voices he heard from the dark made Duncan even more uneasy.

One of the charges against the Frostholm Queen in her rebel-led trial had been “trying to bring the Vanished into the Mortal Realm” and “building a second Vanished”. There was also that “Abyss Exploration Project”, which seemed to be one of the reasons she had been abandoned by everyone… Yet he had never heard Goathead mention any of this!

Goathead often bragged to him about the “great deeds” of the Vanished—how many ships it had swallowed on some route, what kind of huge uproars it had caused in certain city-states. Even if eight out of ten things he said were not reliable, if there really had been a City Lord who “colluded” with the Vanished, Goathead would have told the story long ago. That guy would happily make up three thousand words for no reason at all, let alone for something this big!

Unless… the whole thing was fake, a charge the rebels had fabricated for the Queen.

“Captain? Captain, are you okay?”

Alice’s voice suddenly came from beside him and cut off Duncan’s wild thoughts.

Duncan let out a slow breath and forced the messy thoughts in his head back down. He glanced at Alice, wanting to find a little trace of “Frostholm Queen Ray Nora” in her. But he quickly shook his head and said: “I’m fine. I just saw a bit of the ‘record’ stored inside the spirit coffin.”

“Record?” Alice’s eyes went wide with curiosity. “What kind of record?”

“The scene of the Frostholm Queen’s beheading fifty years ago,” Duncan said calmly. “I saw her—she really looks exactly like you.”

Alice at once reached up to touch her neck. Miss Doll did not know whether she should feel nervous or feel that this was nothing special. She hesitated for quite a while before finally managing to squeeze out a line: “Could I actually be that Frostholm Queen? After I was beheaded, I didn’t die, but instead got changed by some supernatural power and became what I am now?”

Duncan thought about it for a long moment, then answered honestly: “If you didn’t talk, didn’t move, and just lay quietly in that box, I really would think so.”

Alice tried to process that, but failed to get it.

She soon tossed that little confusion aside though, and instead looked very seriously at her spirit coffin: “Then after you… burned it with that ‘fire’, did it change in any way? Did you manage to control it?”

Only then did Duncan turn his full attention back to the wooden box and carefully feel the link that still remained between him and it.

The flame had faded, but the mark it left was still there.

In his unseen senses, he could clearly “see” the mark he had left inside the spirit coffin, and he could feel the thin threads of connection between him and it. It was a bit like the link between him and the mutated Sun emblem, but it was far more complex and far more subtle.

Putting aside the huge mystery of the information stored inside the spirit coffin, he had indeed managed to establish a connection with the thing. But unlike the simple structure of the Sun emblem, he had no idea how to control the spirit coffin.

He could not even sense any “option” for control in it.

He could only be sure of one thing: the spirit coffin was now very calm, very… “tame”.

After the flame passed over it, it seemed to be completely “domesticated”, as if it had become… a part of the Vanished.

“I’m not sure. We may need more tests to know whether it’s truly safe, and even more tests to figure out whether the ‘beheading’ effect comes from the spirit coffin or from you,” Duncan said with a shake of his head. “But from what I can feel right now, it is very ‘obedient’, just like most other items on the Vanished…”

As he spoke, he turned his head to look at the Doll beside him.

“The key now is you—do you feel any Anomaly?”

Alice pointed at herself in surprise: “Me? I don’t. Why are you asking?”

“You and your box are one whole. Together, the two of you make ‘Anomaly 099’. Now that I’ve used the flame to seize the spirit coffin’s authority, you as the Doll might be affected,” Duncan said, looking at Alice very seriously. He knew this Doll was slow to react, so he had gotten used to spelling things out for her. “Move around a bit. If anything feels wrong, tell me.”

Only then did Alice finally react. She quickly jumped up to check herself. She ran around the room twice, then hopped in place a few times. At last she returned to the box and crooked her finger at it.

The box did not move at all.

“It… it, it won’t listen anymore!” Alice cried out, finally noticing something big was wrong. “Before, all I had to do was give an order and it would float right up!”

Something stirred in Duncan’s heart. When Alice had crooked her finger at the box, he had indeed felt a tiny response from the spirit coffin. But…

The spirit coffin was waiting for his command.

His eyebrow twitched, and he suddenly felt a bit awkward: “Maybe… after coming into contact with the spirit form fire, the spirit coffin now sees me as a higher-level ‘master’.”

Alice stared at the Captain in shock. Then her expression turned pitiful and wronged in a way that could be seen with the naked eye.

“But it’s fine. I can remove my hold on it,” Duncan said at once, even more embarrassed the more aggrieved the Doll looked. He waved his hand quickly. “It will still obey your orders.”

Alice blinked, then turned and crooked her finger at the box again. This time, she finally saw the box respond to her command once more, just as it always had.

Miss Doll at once broke into a huge smile. After letting the box land back on the floor, she rushed over and hugged its lid tight: “Great! I thought you weren’t going to listen to me anymore!”

Duncan watched Miss Doll’s emotions flip so fast with a very odd look on his face. After holding it in for a while, he finally said: “Sometimes… I really envy your open-minded attitude toward life.”

When Alice heard this, she froze, then took a long time to think, and still did not get what he meant…

“Forget it. As long as you’re happy,” Duncan sighed. “Are you sure there’s nothing wrong with your body?”

“No,” Alice lowered her head to look herself over. “Nothing feels uncomfortable at all. Actually… I feel kind of better than before?”

“Better than before?”

“I can’t explain it. I just feel… my body is very light? And there’s a steady, safe feeling too?” Alice thought hard, searching for words to describe her feelings. “It’s a bit like the feeling I had when I used to lie inside the box, that kind of peace. But now I’m standing outside the box, and I still feel just as safe…”

The Doll kept talking and thinking at the same time. Before Duncan could help her analyze it, she had already waved it off in her own open-minded way: “Oh well, it doesn’t matter. It’s not a bad thing anyway!”