Chapter 151

Chapter 151: The Fear of Abyssal Demons.

Duncan bent down to examine her.

It really was that nun—the same nun who had just been speaking with Duncan and Shirley, and who, in theory, was still in the main hall praying.

But now she lay here, dead near the entrance to the underground sanctum. Until the moment Duncan pushed the door, she had been using her own body to brace it shut.

It seemed she had been trying to keep something from entering the underground sanctum. Yet judging from her last state before she fell, it also looked as if she had fought desperately against something inside the underground sanctum, then shut the door before she died to keep that thing from escaping.

“She looks… like she just died…”

At this point, Shirley also mustered her courage and stepped closer. She leaned from behind Duncan to peer at the body. Only after two or three seconds did she speak carefully.

“Yes, it looks as if she died not long ago. She even…” Duncan spoke as he placed his hand on the nun’s arm. “She even still has warmth.”

The corpse at the entrance of the underground sanctum still held residual heat. The blood on her wounded body had not yet dried. This even gave Duncan the illusion that when he and Shirley first stepped into the cathedral, the battle in this basement had still been going on, that this nun had still been alive. Maybe… even when they began to search through the cathedral, this nun had still been breathing.

But that was impossible.

This cathedral had been abandoned for eleven years. The supernatural manifestation that had taken place in the city-state of Pland had also happened eleven years ago. If this cathedral really was a key Node on the Veil, then everything here should have happened and ended eleven years back. The nun who had fought to her last breath in the underground sanctum… could not have died only just now.

Duncan’s expression grew serious. He slowly straightened up and looked past the doorway.

As he had expected, the underground sanctum of this community cathedral was only a slightly more spacious basement. There was no light in the hall. Even the ever-burning oil lamps and gas lamps meant to repel evil had long since gone out. Only the faint glow pouring in through the doorway lit the scene within. In the dimness, he could just see a statue of the Goddess standing quietly at the center of the room. On both sides, columns hung with scripture banners stood in rows, and niches for storing holy relics were set into the walls.

Duncan stepped over the nun’s corpse and searched the basement for signs of battle. He saw gouges on the walls and pillars where blades had struck, pockmarks left by bullets, and scorched marks left by fire. These had all been left by the fight.

But the one thing he did not find was an “enemy”. He did not find any of the “intruders” that nun had fought so desperately against before she died.

He turned his head to look at Dog, who was following behind Shirley with his head lowered, cautiously observing everything around them. “Dog, can you see anything?”

“I see signs that time and space have been badly twisted… On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be that kind of ‘overlapping Mortal Realm’ we saw in the cathedral above, but in fact the distortion of time and space here is worse than anywhere else,” Dog said, his tone unusually grave. As the only occult specialist in this three-‘person’ team, his analysis was far more systematic than Duncan’s wild guesses. “In my sight, the whole underground sanctum is shrouded in a thin mist. The wrong time and space have completely replaced the Mortal Realm. But… apart from this distortion of time and space, I haven’t found anything else.”

“What about the ‘intruders’ who attacked this place?” Duncan frowned. “That nun can’t have been playing a mind game with the air, can she?”

“…There are no intruders,” Dog said, sniffing—though he did not actually have a respiratory system. “No scent of living beings. No scent of Abyssal demons or creatures from the Spirit Realm.”

He paused again, then added: “Please trust my judgment on this. A Abyssal Hound’s greatest talent is hunting. Telling prey apart by their scent in any environment is a basic skill for a predator, unless…”

Duncan raised an eyebrow. “Unless?”

Dog quickly swept his gaze around, suddenly much more cautious. He lowered his voice as he came up beside Duncan. “Unless something from Subspace came out… I can’t track that. But if it really is something from Subspace, you should be more familiar with it than I am…”

As soon as Duncan heard that, his face went blank. “Sorry. I’m not familiar at all.”

Dog hastily lowered his head. “If you say you’re not familiar, then you’re not familiar…”

Duncan thought for a moment. He knew Dog definitely did not believe him, but he really was not familiar with Subspace. On the other hand, Dog’s words had indeed reminded him of something.

He recalled the crack he had glimpsed in that instant when he looked at the statue of the Goddess in the cathedral’s main hall. He remembered the chaotic light and shadow leaking from that crack. He remembered the strange manifestations he had seen beneath the hull of the Vanished.

Subspace… was it really something from Subspace that had escaped?

“If it really did come from Subspace…” Duncan frowned, half speaking to himself. “How did it end up barging straight into the Storm Goddess’s sanctuary? Isn’t this supposed to be the safest, best-defended place? And judging from the traces at the scene, it doesn’t look like the intruders attacked from outside. It looks more like they appeared directly inside the sanctuary and then tried to break out…”

“That, I don’t know,” Dog said, shaking his head. “The secrets of the Four Great Churches are a blind spot in the knowledge of Abyssal demons. And Subspace is an officially recognized taboo. Even Dreadfiends do not pry into its mysteries. In fact, from my point of view, humans are even crazier than demons in this field. They actually dare to study Subspace, and after all these years nothing has gone wrong…”

“Humans have always been a bold species,” Duncan said offhand. Then he looked at Dog. “But I am a bit surprised. The Abyssal Deep of the Deep Sea lies right next to Subspace, yet you Abyssal demons are even more afraid of that place than humans? Isn’t Subspace basically your front yard?”

“People who live beside a volcano don’t do it because they love drinking lava,” Dog said, hanging his head as he explained to the big boss. “We live right next to Subspace, so we know better than humans how terrifying it is to fall in.”

Duncan looked thoughtful and finally asked the question he had failed to ask last time. “…So that’s why you fear the Vanished returning from Subspace just as much as humans do?”

Dog shrank his neck and gave Duncan a very careful look, as if he were afraid that talking about this topic might accidentally offend the Master of the Vanished standing before him. But since the big boss had brought it up, he did not dare refuse to answer. He could only say honestly: “Actually… if the Vanished had only returned from Subspace, it would not have been that scary. The key point is that, during the earliest period, that ship kept ‘falling’ back out of the Mortal Realm from time to time. It was like it was bouncing between two dimensions, going back and forth nonstop between Subspace and the Mortal Realm…”

Duncan had only asked casually, but he had not expected to hear information like this. His heart stirred at once. “Bouncing between the Mortal Realm and Subspace?”

“Yes. Each time it passed, it went straight through the Spirit Realm and the Abyssal Deep, sweeping up everything it encountered along the way, like a cannonball charging blindly forward,” Dog said, and his voice clearly trembled at the memory. “I still remember a terrifying scene. The ship fell from the upper layers like an ever-burning meteor of fire. Flames wrapped around screaming humans and a twisted hull. Those mindless, brawling Abyssal demons scattered in panic, but in an instant an immense force swept them into the flames. They fused with those humans into grotesque, twisted lumps, which were then torn apart and scattered into the depths of the Abyssal Deep…

“The Vanished punched through the layers like that, crashed into the depths of Subspace, then two days later crawled back out from below, and then… did it all over again.”

As he spoke, Dog gulped with difficulty. A rough rasping came from his throat, along with the sound of corrosive fluids seething.

“Back then, even some of the most mindless, dull Abyssal demons stopped fighting for a short time. Every day they just stared blankly in the direction of the Spirit Realm. Fear even outweighed their urge to attack, becoming their new instinct… and I was one of those marked most deeply by that fear.”

Duncan listened with a blank face. After a long moment, he finally said: “Then… I understand why you have such deep psychological shadows.”

Dog mustered his courage and looked up at Duncan. “You… you really didn’t know any of this yourself?”

Duncan almost lost his composure. He didn’t know a damn thing! He hadn’t done any of that! Why did every old mess have to be dumped on his head?

But no matter how much he complained, he could only grumble about it in his heart. In front of Dog, he could only keep a straight face. “…Maybe I just didn’t notice.”

Dog: “…”

Seeing how crushed the Abyssal Hound looked, Duncan sighed and added: “I’ll pay attention from now on.”

His tone was very sincere.

Dog was so moved he did not even dare move.

After that, Duncan fell into brief thought.

If everything Dog said was true, then the Vanished… had once gone through a period of complete runaway state? It had not simply sailed back from Subspace. For quite a long time, it had been “bouncing” back and forth between the Mortal Realm and Subspace?!