Chapter 165

Chapter 165: Lucretia’s Pressure

Along with a string of strange noises, the clockwork doll froze up completely like a rusted machine. Almost at the same time, Lucretia, who was in a nearby cabin, sensed the anomaly in her creation.

The cabin door was pushed open. A stack of flying colored paper sheets whirled into the room like a cyclone and, as they spun, gathered into a human shape. Lucretia, the “witch of the sea”, stepped out from the colored paper and, at first glance, saw Lunie, who had slipped down to sit by the table with her head hanging.

“Lunie?” Lucretia hurried forward and at once noticed the clockwork key lying on the floor nearby. She picked up the key and then moved closer, patting the mechanism box on the clockwork doll’s back. “What happened?”

A series of broken creaks came from inside Lunie. After a while, some of her parts finally began to move again, and a badly distorted voice sounded from her chest: “Old Master… is looking for you…”

With a clang, the clockwork key in Lucretia’s hand fell to the floor.

Lunie turned her head toward the sound and, by instinct, reached out to grope for her own clockwork key, trying to put it back into her back. But halfway through the motion she jammed again, and the sound of gears spinning idly followed.

Lucretia’s face changed sharply. When she heard the words “Old Master”, her pupils trembled. But the sounds of failure inside Lunie soon snapped her back to herself. She shook her head hard, forced down her swirling thoughts, and grabbed the clockwork doll’s shoulders: “Lunie, stand by.”

The clockwork doll slowly closed her eyes. “Command received, Lunie entering standby.”

A short time later, deep in the Radiant Star’s hull, in a brightly lit cabin, Lucretia was busy beside a workbench.

This was a laboratory that could be called “complete and advanced” even by the standards of the Truth Academy’s headquarters. The wide room was filled with intricate machines and pneumatic tube lines that supplied power to various devices. Between the countless machines stood auxiliary devices covered in magic runes, along with many crystal containers or reactor boilers that gave off a faint light. A dozen automated mechanism dolls tended these self-running devices, so Lucretia could focus all her attention on the work in front of her.

In front of this “witch of the sea”, Lunie lay quietly on the wide workbench.

The clockwork doll had already been taken apart. The outer shell shaped like a maid’s outfit had been set aside. The fine-gold frame and all sorts of brass mechanism parts almost covered the whole bench. Only the part of Lunie’s body above the chest still remained intact. That part lay at the edge of the platform. She stared blankly at her disassembled body and blinked her eyes from time to time.

“Is it… easy… to fix?” A slightly off-key voice came from Lunie’s chest.

“Don’t worry. The drive mechanisms just jammed all of a sudden and warped the bearings,” Lucretia said as she worked without looking up. “The workload is large, but the repair itself is not complicated. Your ‘heart’ was not damaged.”

Lunie slowly moved her eyes and saw the “heart” placed at the center of the workbench.

It was a delicate clockwork heart sphere made from countless complex metal plates joined together. It floated quietly above a pile of parts. The metal plates on its surface shifted from time to time, revealing the structure inside. When the plates turned to the right angle, one could clearly see that the inside of the sphere was covered in shining runes, and something even more slender floated at the center of those runes.

It was a piece of a finger—a very slim, very fragile finger, even thinner than the finger of a human child. A dollmaker had carefully crafted it a hundred years ago.

That was the true core and true essence of the mechanism doll “Lunie”—the last proof left in this world of a certain doll that had been created a hundred years ago.

Lucretia noticed Lunie’s gaze. She looked up at it, and her hands suddenly paused.

After a moment, she went back to work and spoke as if by accident: “I turned you into what you are now. Have you ever hated me for it?”

“Lunie… why would Lunie hate you?” The doll’s head on the workbench spoke in a stiff voice. “Mistress… gave Lunie life. Lunie is… glad because of that…”

“But at first, all of this was only because I was acting on a whim. For that whim, I destroyed your original body,” Lucretia said softly. “For a long time at the beginning, I did not realize that the border’s influence had given you real thinking. Back then, I only thought you were a machine and carried out many ‘experimental modifications’ on you without caring about the consequences.”

Lunie did not answer her Mistress. After a short silence, she suddenly spoke: “You are tense. You have something on your mind—under normal conditions, Mistress would not suddenly say such strange things.”

Lucretia stayed silent for two or three seconds. “…Do you remember what you just said? When I arrived at the dining room and woke you up.”

“…Memory search failed. Lunie does not remember.”

“You told me that ‘Old Master’ was looking for me.”

A strange sound came from the clockwork doll’s chest, not from a fault, but from confused thinking.

“Do you really not remember?” Lucretia raised her head and gazed quietly into Lunie’s eyes.

“Memory search failed. Lunie does not remember.”

“…Then it seems my terrifying father does not want me to have any chance to look back at his situation,” Lucretia said, a complicated smile appearing on her face. She slowly took out a warped set of gears, and her tone drifted. “He only sent a one-way signal to tell me… he knows where the Radiant Star is. He knows how to find me…”

“You are afraid.”

“Scared to death—but more than fear, it is a kind of… sadness.”

“Sad? Why?”

Lucretia looked into Lunie’s eyes. After a long time, she gently shook her head. “That feeling is too complex for you. You probably cannot understand it yet.”

“All right. Lunie will try to understand later,” the clockwork doll replied. Then she asked, “Do you think Old Master is giving you some kind of warning?”

“…I do not know, but it really does feel like a warning,” Lucretia said softly. “It even feels like a kind of declaration before a hunt… He has returned from Subspace, and he is even harder to grasp than the last time he came back. Maybe I should warn my Big Brother…”

“You really should remind Mr. Tyrian. He has already set out for Pland, and the governor of Pland said that the Vanished is approaching that city-state.”

Lucretia nodded lightly and said nothing more. She just lowered her head and went on working.

…

Duncan carefully put “Nilu” back into the antique wooden chest, then returned the feather-shaped hair clip to the drawer.

Then he stared at the box holding “Nilu” and felt troubled.

As a grown man, he felt that keeping a maiden-style doll in his bedroom was a bit wrong.

But aside from keeping it in his bedroom, he could not think of a better place.

Even though the first test had gained nothing and he had not found any hint of the supernatural in the doll “Nilu”, this was still an item related to “Lucretia”. Since he could not be sure whether it would be useful in the future, he did not dare leave the doll anywhere out of his sight.

After struggling with it for a while, Duncan sighed and set Nilu’s box for now at the head of his bed.

“If you really have something special, then show it soon,” he said as he looked at the ornate old box and shook his head. “Don’t be like Alice, who had to be thrown into the sea before she showed off that coffin-charging-through-the-waves stunt.”

The wooden box, of course, did not respond, but Duncan did not care.

He went to the window and looked at the sky outside.

The veil of night had already descended. The pale, dim glow of the World’s Wound shone over the Boundless Sea.

The great banishing power brought by the Sun had faded from the Mortal Realm. Twisted, ominous, corrupting forces were slowly rising all over the world. At this time of night, humans would enter Dreamwalking in order to avoid the world’s interference with their sanity.

But for Duncan… he had never felt any discomfort under the veil of night, nor had he seen the Shadows that frightened ordinary people.

Night was when his mind was sharpest.

He went back to his desk, quietly laid out a sheet of blank paper, and picked up a fountain pen.

He had just bought these things from the city-state of Pland.

After thinking for a moment, he wrote line after line on the paper:

In 1889, a fragment of the Sun appeared and caused the great fire of Pland;

Under the Veil of the factories in the Sixth District, a “Mortal Realm” burned by the fire was hidden;

Inside the Cathedral in the Sixth District community there existed a warped space-time that seemed to be a closed time loop. Two completely opposite Mortal Realms overlapped inside the Cathedral;

Dog’s “humanity” had an unknown source, but it was clearly not the power of the Sun fragment;

The statue of the Goddess inside the Cathedral in the Sixth District seemed to have been affected by a Subspace rift. The nun in the underground sanctum seemed to have died while fighting against the Subspace invasion…