Chapter 187

Chapter 187: Preaching the End

The Subspace believer who had just awakened fell into a strange ecstasy after learning that he was on the Vanished. He raised his hands and shouted wildly, the words so jumbled no one could understand them. His crazed runaway state even scared Alice, who stumbled back two steps—she only just managed to grab her head in time so it wouldn’t fall off.

“This batch of local specialty is terrifying!” Miss Doll stared wide?eyed as she hid behind Duncan. “What’s wrong with him?”

How was Duncan supposed to know? He hadn’t even finished asking his own questions!

Then the other two Enders woke up one after another. Once they understood where they were, they also fell into the same sort of ecstasy as the first, screaming and raving, shouting things like “the Promised Ark” and “the gate of Subspace.” No matter what Duncan and Alice said beside them, they were completely unable to communicate.

By this point, Duncan had more or less guessed why these Enders had gone into such a frenzy.

They were fanatics chasing after Subspace, and the Vanished was a ghost ship that had returned from Subspace. In the eyes of these madmen… did the Vanished count as some kind of “miracle”?

Were they crazed believers who had seen a miracle?

But their feverish excitement still seemed a bit too much.

The three cultists clung together, crying and laughing and shouting at the same time. They praised the greatness of Subspace while shouting the name of the Vanished. Now and then they even let out sounds from their throats that no human should be able to make. Their layered, trembling cries really did sound like roars echoing from Subspace itself. In the end they even knelt on the deck all at once and began kissing the deck of the Vanished!

That final act finally angered Alice, who had just been watching the spectacle from the side. Miss Doll’s eyes went round. She ran over, grabbed a mop, and brought it down on one cultist’s head: “I just washed this deck!”

Before Alice even finished shouting, two buckets and several mops nearby came rolling and hopping over as well, laying into the crazed cultists with a flurry of blows. The fanatics’ wild, unhinged cries, Alice’s scolding, and the clatter of buckets and mops all mixed together, and the Vanished, which was usually especially quiet most of the time, suddenly became noisy and chaotic.

Duncan stared, dumbfounded. The scene of “the cursed Doll and her lackeys beating up intruders” shocked him deeply. His first reaction was to wonder when this doll had gotten so close with everything on the deck. Only after that did he hurry forward to stop the farce: “Stop!”

The buckets and mops stopped at once. Alice still couldn’t help snapping the mop across one Ender’s head again, then gave him a kick for good measure before stomping away, muttering resentfully, “I just washed the deck, and they went and licked it all over…”

“I also think what they did was pretty disgusting, but this is a bit much…” Duncan gave the doll a helpless look, then turned to the cultists who had just been beaten soundly. “Have you calmed down yet?”

The Enders lay on the deck. Despite the beating they had just taken, they showed no sign of weakness or fear. Instead they were still full of energy, their faces twisted into creepy smiles. Their seemingly thin, bony bodies had an astonishing tolerance for pain, as if they had already thrown away the normal pain senses of human beings.

After hearing Duncan’s words, one Preacher slowly turned his head. He looked into Duncan’s eyes, and his muddied gaze took a long time to focus. Then a chilling laugh spilled out of his mouth: “Ha, haha… gatekeeper of the Promised Land, ghost at the helm, navigator of the Ark! I can see… I can see your heart! How pathetic… you have received this supreme blessing, yet you refuse His grace… You were qualified to step into the Promised Land, yet you turned it down! You… are dull!”

Duncan frowned slightly.

Alice immediately leaned in from behind him: “Captain, should I beat him up again?”

The buckets and mops beside her hopped closer at once, swaying behind Alice.

Like lackeys, and the lackeys of lackeys.

“Go wait quietly over there for a bit,” Duncan waved his hand. He stared at the Ender who was still letting out strange laughs at him, his face expressionless. “From the sound of it, you know quite a lot about this ‘ghost captain’ of yours.”

“Subspace whispers your name… whispers your dull refusal…” The cultist grinned. The blood from the beating trickled from the corner of his mouth and crawled along his chin as if it had a life of its own, like tiny tentacles. “You had already been granted that supreme blessing, so why run away… Don’t you know that Subspace is the eternal and final destination of all things? You had already reached the end… why turn back from that end?!”

Duncan simply used his gaze on this cultist, who might have lost his mind or might just be caught in pure fanaticism. His face stayed calm, but his heart was stirred.

These fanatics who followed Subspace really did know a few things. Their insane faith had not only given them eerie powers, it had also let them learn some secrets related to Subspace. What this man was saying… might actually contain a part of the truth.

Had Captain Duncan fled from Subspace? Had he rejected Subspace’s divine blessing?

Could it be that when the Vanished first fell into Subspace back then, the real “Captain Duncan” had not gone completely mad like the outside world claimed? That the Vanished’s return voyage from Subspace had actually been a successful escape? That “Captain Duncan” still had some sanity left back then?

When did he completely lose his mind? And when did he die?

Duncan suddenly thought of Goathead’s attitude whenever Subspace came up—wary, resistant, and even faintly afraid.

That seemed to indirectly confirm the Ender’s words. It confirmed that escape.

Then the Ender fell back into a hazy state. He started muttering things only he could understand, sometimes suddenly bursting into joyful laughter, sometimes slapping his own body. His two companions never really sobered up at all, lost from beginning to end in a disturbing mental chaos.

These followers of Subspace were even more insane than the Suntists Duncan had seen, and even further from the normal sanity of the mortal world. They seemed to be in a constant state of mental unrest, their thoughts drifting between the mortal world and Subspace. Unless someone was talking to them or they were carrying out a specific task, they could not think or communicate normally.

Was it because they had been affected by Subspace? Or had they shattered their own reason on purpose, using this method to embrace Subspace of their own will?

What puzzled Duncan even more was this—how did such crazy, bizarre cultists, whose very appearance had changed, move around the city?state in their daily lives?

With madmen like these, they wouldn’t even have time to hide. They would be surrounded and riddled with bullets by the Guardians’ Steam Walkers within five steps of walking down the street!

After a while longer, seeing that the Enders still showed no sign of coming to their senses, Duncan had to take the initiative again: “Why did you attack Shirley?”

The three cultists reacted. One of them lifted his head in a daze, his body swaying left and right. “Attack? Attack who?”

“What you just did.” Duncan’s voice was cold and hard, his face like water. “You attacked a girl with a Abyssal Hound—why did you attack her?”

“Attack… oh, attack…” The dazed cultist suddenly bared his teeth and shouted loudly: “We were only putting everything back on the right track, so that the correct history can arrive smoothly! A loophole, a flaw, a little hidden danger… the hidden danger must be removed… She should have died in the correct history. She shouldn’t have survived! As long as she lives… the loopholes will keep appearing…”

“The correct history?” Duncan’s eyes changed slightly as he listened to the cultist’s crazed ravings. He caught the key information at once and reacted instantly. “Pland’s timeline went wrong—was that your doing?!”

“Went wrong? There’s nothing wrong, nothing wrong at all… We are only putting everything back on the right track!” The madman lifted his face, his eyes filled with martyr?like fervor. “The whole world should return to the right track! Doom was delayed for so many years. Everyone defied Subspace’s gift and the fate that should have come! We are correcting history onto its proper path!”

“Correcting history onto its proper path!” The other two Enders beside him seemed infected and also began shouting praises in a frenzy. After shouting, one of them even stood up, raised both hands high, and proclaimed some kind of truth: “Only by returning to the proper track can there be rebirth after total annihilation! Subspace will devour everything, and Subspace will reshape everything! The fire has gone out, the embers can hardly burn… only by lighting a second bonfire can the world continue to exist within that grace!”