Chapter 129

Chapter 129: Night

The Vanished picked up to full speed.

In the pale glow cast by the World’s Wound, the translucent spirit form sails billowed without wind. The huge, complex forest of masts and ropes creaked as if moved by countless unseen hands, adjusting their angles quickly and precisely. Duncan felt the hull under his feet sway and tilt, the bow turning toward some direction in the Boundless Sea. The fine sound of waves slapping against the hull mixed with the “sensory signals” that the Vanished itself sent back, echoing softly in the depths of his mind.

For some reason, the moment the ship changed course, he suddenly felt that the mood on the ship had quietly changed. The scenery around was clearly exactly the same, but…

It felt as if he heard the ship let out a quiet sigh of satisfaction.

Duncan left the captain’s cabin and strolled onto the deck. In the night, he raised his head and cast his gaze at the swollen sails and towering masts, then reached out and tapped a nearby railing, saying thoughtfully: “Are you also bored with drifting around without a goal?”

The Vanished did not answer. Only a faint creaking rose from beneath the deck. Several ropes nearby rustled, sliding over like snakes and swaying back and forth beside Duncan.

“…That is not cute. It’s actually a bit scary,” Duncan gave the ropes a look. “This is how you scared Alice into running for her life last time, isn’t it?”

The ropes swayed in place twice, then slipped away quickly.

Duncan took a light breath, ready to enjoy the cool night wind at sea. But suddenly, a distant “tug” appeared in his consciousness.

At first he did not react to what it was, but then he realized that the tug came from the Pland city-state.

In the Pland city-state, Duncan on the second floor of the antique shop suddenly blinked and immediately looked in a certain direction. That was Nina’s room next door.

In his sight, a cluster of ghostly emerald flame was flickering rapidly in that room. It was not Nina, but the mark left on Shirley.

That flame had sensed supernatural power growing and sensed that its host’s emotions were fluctuating abnormally.

What happened to Shirley?!

Duncan did not hesitate. He got up, rushed out of his room, and came to the door of Nina’s bedroom. He knocked lightly, but there was no response inside.

He hesitated for a moment, but in the next second he felt the mark on Shirley flicker again.

There was no time to overthink at a moment like this. Duncan pushed open Nina’s door.

Just like when she was little, Nina still did not have the habit of locking her door when she slept.

The bedroom was dim. Only the faint light of the streetlamp outside shone in through the window, outlining the shapes of things in the room. Within his field of view, Duncan did not see anything out of the ordinary.

Shirley and Nina were quietly sleeping on the bed. One had her head toward the foot of the bed, and the other lay sideways across the other’s stomach.

…Their sleeping positions were very artistic.

Of course, Duncan had no interest in studying how the two girls slept. He had already noticed the deep frown on Shirley’s face, and on the arm she normally used to summon Dog and form the symbiotic pact with the chains, faint black lines were slowly crawling.

Duncan frowned slightly, then activated the mark he had left on Shirley, trying to use the special nature of the spirit form flame to search for the source of “corruption” in the room.

In his view, Shirley’s current state, together with the mark’s warning, was without a doubt a sign that supernatural power was starting to produce corruption.

A tiny green flame rose up beside Shirley. The ghostly green fire lit the surroundings, but after flickering a few times, it stayed right where it was.

There was no corruption in the room.

Duncan’s brow furrowed. He leaned closer and studied the tight frown on Shirley’s face.

Because he did not know how much the spirit form fire might affect living people, he could not release a large mass of flames to “scan” the whole room the way he had in the factory. But even a single spark of spirit form fire should react to unfamiliar supernatural power.

corruption… was not in the Mortal Realm? On the mental level? Or was it something else?

Duncan fell into thought. Then he seemed to think of something, quietly left the room, and closed the door. Back in his own bedroom, he saw the Pigeon Spirit dozing on the windowsill.

“Spirit Realm Walk.”

Amid AI’s angry cooing after being woken, Duncan once more entered that dark space filled with endless starlight. Then he calmed himself, and like when he had sensed the White Oak and Vanna before, he focused on the starlight around him that belonged to his own Marks.

This was not hard, because those Marks had been left on purpose by him and were much clearer and more stable than the “sparks” on Vanna. Duncan almost instantly locked onto the point of starlight that belonged to Shirley…

Shirley opened her eyes in the dark and found herself lying on a small bed that was both familiar and strange.

Feeling her way in the dark, she sat up. Her mind stayed sluggish for a long while before she slowly woke. She looked around in confusion and finally made out some outlines in the darkness.

Some familiar yet distant memories slowly woke up. After she saw the scene around her clearly, Shirley’s eyes flew wide open.

In the next second, she jumped down from the bed, letting out a string of furious curses, so furious that her voice even trembled, the tremble carrying fear and panic: “Damn, damn, damn… damn it! It’s this again, this again! Damn it!”

The loud stream of curses shattered the quiet in the dark, but the voice was not the one Shirley was used to. It was younger, more childish, a child’s voice that had only existed in her memories. She landed on the floor and saw that her hands and feet had become as thin and small as they were in those memories. She wore a light pink nightgown, exactly the same as in her memory, with the familiar little dog clumsily stitched over the torn cuff.

“Stop messing with me! Stop messing with me!”

Shirley shouted in the dark room and rushed to the closed door. She kicked and punched, trying to break the mottled wooden boards, but the door was as unmoving as if cast from steel and concrete. She threw her head against it, even bit the doorknob, but it was all just a meaningless way to vent. With her small body she could only slam into it again and again, while the Time-Stream flowed past, while a little morning light crept in through the nearby window, while the sound she least wanted to hear on this early morning came from outside the door.

She heard someone get up in the next room. She heard footsteps, and the sounds of things being packed.

She heard one set of footsteps approach the door, and a very gentle, very familiar voice spoke softly: “Shirley, Shirley? Are you up? Are you still angry?”

Shirley’s pounding stopped all at once, as if all strength had been drained from her. She leaned against the wooden door, pressing herself to it with everything she had. She did not want to listen, yet greedily took in every sound from outside.

“Shirley, Dad and I are going to buy you a cake. Today is your birthday… When we come back, you won’t be angry anymore, all right?”

“Don’t go…” Shirley suddenly spoke. At first it was just a tiny mutter, but soon the mutter turned into a shout. “Don’t go… Don’t go! Don’t go! Don’t go!”

At last she cried out, shouting even though she knew it was useless: “Don’t go! Don’t go out! Don’t go out, damn it! Don’t go out!”

But time still moved on to the next second, like a memory carved into her mind that could never go back. The footsteps outside the door went farther away.

The sound of a bag being picked up, her parents’ distant, blurry conversation, the turn of the doorknob, opening, closing, and the key turning once, then half a turn more.

Shirley slowly sat down in the dark and began to count her own heartbeat.

When she reached the one thousand two hundredth beat, shouts of “Fire!” came from far away.

When she reached the one thousand six hundredth, the stinging smell of smoke and choking fumes began to seep through the crack under the door.

When she counted to one thousand eight hundred, the street outside was full of frantic shouting, and harsh red light flooded the window, as if the whole city-state had been dropped into molten lava.

When she reached the two thousandth heartbeat, a heavy dull crash came from the front door. The door had been broken, as if some huge beast was stepping in with heavy footsteps, coming closer step by step to this locked room.

Then the door of the room finally fell. The wooden door that Shirley could not have broken even with all her strength shattered like torn paper.

A terrifying creature appeared there. It was a huge black Hellhound, a nightmare twisted together from bone, shadows, smoke, and burning ash. For a six-year-old child, this demon from the Abyssal Deep was almost a giant. Now its empty, blood-red sockets had already locked onto the “living thing” in the room.

Shirley calmly fixed her gaze on the Hellhound in front of her.

This was a Abyssal Hound, but it was not yet her Dog.

It was not the Dog who had a “heart”, not the Dog who rummaged through trash bins to find food for her, not the Dog who tried to tell bad jokes to make her laugh and ended up only teaching her a pile of swear words.

The Abyssal Hound stepped into the room.

The sound of flesh and bone being chewed rang out.

Shirley lay on the floor, feeling her limbs being devoured by the Hellhound. The piercing pain was muffled and numb as it spread through her mind through the Veil of eleven years of memory. She kept counting her own heartbeat, counting how long until Dog would become her Dog, and calculating how long she would have to stay here this time. Based on past experience, would it be a week? Or two weeks?

Her consciousness slowly started to blur. Even in this pitch-black dream, the distant, dull, and numb pain finally began to catch up with her. In her ever more vague vision, she suddenly saw a figure appear on the bed not far away, in the deepest darkness of the shadows.

The figure did not seem to have appeared all of a sudden. It was as if he had been there from the very beginning, from the start of this dream, from the start of every dream, and even—Shirley did not know why she would have such a shocking thought—even from eleven years ago.

He just sat there, yet she only noticed his existence for the first time now, as if a long-standing fog had suddenly split open, letting her glimpse what lay behind it.

A faint glimmer of ghostly green flame emerged from nowhere, lighting up the figure’s face: gloomy and imposing. Shirley had never seen this face before, yet she felt a strange familiarity.

“No offense meant.”

The gloomy, imposing figure spoke.