Chapter 107

Chapter 107: Highly Contagious

Gentle waves rose and fell. The Vanished sailed smoothly across the Boundless Sea. After many days under sail, this ancient ghost ship still had not found any island or beacon that could serve as a mark of the route.

The long drifting journey seemed to have no end, but its captain still had many things to keep him busy.

Duncan returned once more to the captain’s cabin. The golden Sun mask still lay quietly on the table, but before he dealt with that, he had other matters to think about.

He could make arrangements for Alice later. The follow-up tests and research on Anomaly 099 were not urgent either. The Frostholm rebellion from half a century ago was even less something he needed to investigate right now. But aside from these matters, there was one more thing that was closely tied to himself.

Duncan raised his head and looked at the mirror hanging on the wall.

The green flames that had once floated on the mirror’s surface had long since faded. The distant scenes that had once appeared in the mirror had also vanished without a trace. Yet Duncan could still faintly feel that the weak and blurry “connection” had not disappeared with the reflection. It was still there, pointing far away toward the great Cathedral at the center of the city-state of Pland.

This connection felt a bit like the link between himself and the “antique shopkeeper” and the “White Oak”, but even weaker and more ethereal. If he had to describe it… it was like some kind of offshoot, a secondary channel branching out from a clear and solid link.

Duncan closed his eyes a little. On the table beside him, the brass spirit compass on AI’s chest quietly opened a narrow gap. A dim green flame burned quietly inside it.

Duncan returned again to that dark space filled with countless starlights and streams of light.

But this time, he did not carry out a full “Spirit Realm walk”. He only stayed at the Critical Threshold of entering the Spirit Realm and watched carefully as the faint lights and the scattered points of light moved through the darkness.

He first saw the brightest “star”. That star pointed toward the antique shop and stood for his other body. That body was cleaning the storeroom and checking the stock at the same time.

He then saw a hazy, shapeless cloud of light, much larger than any normal star. That represented the “White Oak”, a steamship that had once crashed head-on into the Vanished and been completely burned through by the fire of his spirit form.

Finally, in a patch of hazy starlight that looked almost no different from the rest, he picked out the “star” that had a faint link to himself.

Duncan leaned closer in curiosity, wanting to study this cluster of starlight.

But as soon as he drew near, he felt a subtle repelling force spread out from that starlight.

The repelling force was not very strong. It felt like a pure, firm will that was protecting itself. Duncan felt that if he forced the fire of his spirit form to spread toward it, he could probably burn away this instinctive protection. But he still stopped at once and kept a distance from that starlight.

The master behind this starlight should be that Inquisitor named “Vanna”, a Storm Saint and a powerful supernatural. If he acted too recklessly, he might startle the starlight’s master first, and in the worst case, might even alarm the “God” who stood behind that Saint.

While he still knew very little about the Gods of this world, Duncan did not plan to take that risk.

From another angle, this faint sense of rejection might also be reminding him that these stars were not all the same.

When he first took over the body of that “sacrificial victim”, he had not felt any rejection. There had been no rejection when he took over the body of the newly dead cultist Ron, either. So why did this repelling force appear around Vanna’s starlight now?

Was it because she was still “alive”? Was it because a living mind would instinctively resist indescribable corruption? Or was it because of… the protection given by faith and divine grace?

Duncan stepped back a bit. While he thought about what these stars meant, he reached slowly toward another cluster of starlight that was closest to him.

He stopped at the last moment before touching that starlight.

There was no repelling force.

Then he tried many times around him. None of those stars pushed him away when he drew near. In some of them, he even faintly felt some new… “elements”.

He felt a vivid sense of life, and even sensed those stars trembling and shrinking in instinctive fear. That was life drawing back when it faced the Shadows of an irresistible death.

Duncan returned to a part of the darkness where the starlight could not reach and looked down at his own hands.

Strands of emerald flame moved through the dark, tracing out illusions of light between his fingers.

It seemed that as he walked the Spirit Realm more and more often, his control and perception of the flames had grown sharper and more precise. Now he could actually sense the presence of life inside those stars.

Duncan frowned slightly and looked toward the far reaches of the endless darkness. The countless points of light stretched densely through the chaotic dark. The sight was almost grand.

Out of caution, he had never explored the far parts of this dark space. But just by looking at how vast the starlight was, he could imagine how many light points there really were here.

At the start, he had thought that all the stars here stood for “corpses” that had just died and met certain conditions, because the first two times he “attached” to someone, he had taken over corpses. But now he felt the presence of life in some of the stars. That meant his first guess was wrong.

Among these stars were not only the dead but also the living. He had simply happened to take over two corpses at first.

The “Inquisitor” named Vanna was also among these stars, and she was without a doubt alive.

Could it be that the countless stars here represented all the living and the dead in the whole world?

Duncan frowned in the dark. The guess rose naturally in his mind and seemed reasonable enough, but he quickly shook his head. He felt he could not jump to a conclusion so fast.

There were many stars here, and the population of this world was far smaller than Earth’s. Even so, the stars he could see at a glance still did not seem enough to match the whole world’s people. And it was one thing to count the living. How was anyone supposed to define the number of the dead?

Did it include every dead person since ancient times? Or only those whose bodies still remained? Did any body remnant count, or did the time since death have to be within a certain limit?

Besides, there were also clusters of light like the “White Oak” here… Even a ship could show a matching projection here. How was that supposed to be explained?

So it was still too early to rashly treat the starlight here as “all the living and the dead in the world”. At the very least, he needed enough proof before he could make such a claim.

But no matter how the stars here tied back to the Mortal Realm, one thing was clear: most of the starlight did not resist Duncan when he drew near. Only Vanna, this “Saint”, showed this kind of self-protective response.

That was probably the work of the God she worshiped.

Duncan felt a little curious about the power of “faith” in this world.

But no matter how strong the shield Vanna had built through faith was, it clearly had a flaw. That barrier had not stopped the captain of the Vanished and her from forming a kind of hidden link on the deep layers.

That left only one question: when and how had this link been formed?

Duncan thought hard in the darkness, thinking about what connection he could have with that Inquisitor he had never met and why such a link had appeared out of nowhere. After he ruled out one guess after another, a very bold thought suddenly rose in his mind—

Could it be that it came from the very first “sacrificial victim” he had possessed?!

Duncan recalled the first time he set foot on the land of the city-state of Pland. He thought back to that Sun sacrificial rite. He had caused chaos at the ceremony in the role of the sacrificial victim and then left the “body” he had possessed behind at the scene. Not long after that, Inquisitor Vanna had led a raid on the cultists’ stronghold, captured the cultists who had stayed at the scene, and had surely taken part in cleaning up the “remains” there.

If he had to say so, the only “intersection” between him and that Inquisitor, that young lady, could only have happened then.

All they shared was a body he had once possessed and a place where they had once both been present.

“That alone… was enough to create a link?!” The more Duncan thought about it, the more possible it seemed. He lowered his head in surprise and looked at his own hands. After a while, his shocked expression turned into a very strange, helpless smile. “What kind of space-time fellow traveler infection route is this supposed to be…”