Chapter 191

Chapter 191: Nonlinear Existence and Preparations to Go to the City-State

The doll once again rode the waves back to the Vanished, and she looked a little shaken. After listening to the embarrassed doll’s jumbled account, Duncan also stared in shock.

“They disappeared? Vanished into thin air right in front of you?” Duncan stared, dumbfounded, at Alice, then looked toward the lifeboat that the winch had just hoisted to the ship’s side. The ropes they had used to tie up the Enders still lay on the little boat, but the cultists who had been bound by them were long gone.

“Yeah, yeah! They were just gone in an instant! Not even a sound!” Alice waved her hands as she explained her strange experience to Duncan. “The moment the sunlight fell on them, they disappeared, as if they had never existed at all…”

“They disappeared without a sound the moment the sunlight fell on them…” Duncan frowned. He had imagined countless ways those Enders might escape or resist, but he had never thought they would simply vanish like that. It made many of his preparations useless. “If they had just jumped into the sea, I could still understand it—at least that counts as soluble in water. But soluble in sunlight? What kind of principle is that… Could it be related to the Sun? Does the Sun’s suppressive power keep them from remaining in the Mortal Realm?”

“I don’t know.” Alice stared wide-eyed, sounding perfectly confident.

“I wasn’t asking you,” Duncan gave the doll a look. “Before they disappeared, did anything seem off? What were they saying? Did they perform some strange ritual?”

“They… just kept muttering, talking about Subspace, some promised land, some destined End and rebirth and cycles,” Alice rubbed her head, then suddenly remembered. “Oh, right! One of the cultists also said, ‘Our day is over again.’…”

“Their ‘day’ is over again?” Duncan’s brow creased at once, and for some reason he thought of what one Ender had told him before—

They hid within history that had fallen under the curse.

Some ridiculous guesses rose in his mind, but when he thought about how absurd this world already was, even the wildest things did not seem all that impossible.

“Captain?” Alice saw that Duncan had been frowning and thinking for a long time without answering her. At last she could not help speaking up: “What did you think of? You…”

“Nothing,” Duncan shook his head. It sounded half like he was talking to himself, half like a soft sigh. “I just suddenly had a crazy thought. Those so-called Enders… I’m afraid they might be a kind of Nonlinear Existence…”

“Nonlinear Existence?” Alice froze. With her limited brain and knowledge, she could not keep up with the captain’s train of thought. “What does that mean?”

“…You’d better not ask. With your level of intelligence, it would be hard to explain it clearly,” Duncan glanced at Alice, hesitated for two seconds, then still shook his head. “But I suddenly understood why the book Morris gave me said that the Enders are the most mysterious and the hardest cultists to find and capture… It’s too absurd.”

Too absurd—Duncan repeated in his heart.

They hid within an abnormal flow of history, themselves a form of Nonlinear Existence, shuttling through the Mortal Realm with the cycle of day and night. Unless they were killed on the spot, you could never detain today a Ender you had caught yesterday—that was the staggering truth he had deduced from the clues so far.

By comparison, the Suntists—though just as cruel and dark, and mostly made up of rabble—suddenly seemed much more ordinary and almost familiar. They also had the strange trait of constantly transforming out of ordinary people under the influence of the creeping Sun Wheel, but at least they were not twisted to this degree.

Still, that raised another question. If the Enders really were a kind of Nonlinear Existence as he guessed, then how had they ended up like this? How could ordinary humans separate themselves from the normal time stream and become some sort of “slice creature” that existed discontinuously in time?

Was it just because they followed Subspace… and so received Subspace’s mad, deranged “divine blessing”?

“Captain, you’re staring off again…”

Alice’s voice sounded again. The doll was looking at Duncan with a hint of worry.

“I’m fine.” Duncan let out a soft breath and packed away those messy thoughts. He felt it was too early to hold a mental storm over this. After all, this was his first real contact with these Subspace believers, and it was no use making the wildest guesses too soon.

He turned his gaze back to Alice.

“You saw the note I gave you, right?” he asked casually.

“I did!” Alice nodded at once, happy. “When I first saw the box I was scared. I thought you were telling me not to come back. Then I saw the note and felt better… I couldn’t read the words on it, but I understood the picture you drew…”

Duncan’s mouth twitched. The sudden impulse he’d had after writing that note had really come in handy. This doll really was illiterate. “…So you really can’t read.”

“I can’t read at all!” Alice said with her usual confidence. “I lay in the box for so many years. It’s already amazing that I picked up some common sense just by listening. How could I have learned to recognize words too…”

Duncan was silent.

“Captain, what are you thinking about?”

“I suddenly wondered… whether it would work to hold a tutoring class on the Vanished or in the antique shop,” Duncan sighed. “Counting you, I already know two illiterates—and if I add the dog, that makes three. That’s enough to form a study group.”

Alice thought for a bit. “What is a tutoring class? And what is a study group?”

“…I’ll explain later,” Duncan waved a hand, and his expression grew a little more serious. “Let’s talk about the ‘test’ first. Those three cultists were all normal before they vanished, right? Even after you sent the chest over, they weren’t affected in any way?”

“Of course they were normal. Their heads were still on their necks. I saw it very clearly.”

Duncan curled his fingers under his chin and looked at Alice, deep in thought.

Though the traits of the Enders were bizarre, they definitely did not have the power or “supernatural resistance” of the Saint. After all, Shirley had smashed three of them to death just by swinging the dog at them. That proved their flesh-and-blood bodies were still “normal material” that could be destroyed. At most, their tolerance for pain was far beyond that of ordinary people.

And now those three Enders had stayed beside Alice for so long without being affected at all. In other words… had the effect of Guillotine really disappeared?

Watching Duncan’s changing expression, even Alice finally began to catch on. She cautiously edged closer, tilted her face up, a faint hope on her features: “Captain… did I pass my ‘test’? Can you take me to the city-state now?”

“The test… should be passed. The strange traits of those Enders still make me uneasy, but judging from the result…” Duncan spoke slowly, still thinking and weighing things, but in the end he nodded. “All right, the test really is passed. It looks like your Guillotine ability is under control now.”

He paused there, and before Alice could start celebrating, he added: “I’ll take you to a city-state, but not right away. You lack a lot of basic knowledge about the human world, and you also have parts that are easy to give away, like your fingers and the joints of your wrists. For the first, you need a lot of extra lessons. For the second, we need some disguises.”

“Mm-hmm, I know, I know!” Alice nodded hard. She did not seem discouraged at all by the problems Duncan mentioned. Instead she looked even more motivated. “Mr. Goathead told me that too. He said the human world is very complicated, that even going out to buy vegetables has a pile of rules. He said if I want to go to a human city-state, I definitely have to ‘catch up on my lessons’, and that if there’s anything I don’t understand I can ask…”

“Don’t ask him!!” Before Alice could finish, Duncan felt a jolt and quickly cut off this doll who spent all day thick as thieves with Goathead and looked about ready to grow crooked for good. “He’s even less human-shaped than you are, and you want to learn human society from him? Where is your brain?”

Alice looked completely innocent. “I don’t have one!”

Duncan almost choked on his own breath. He stared for a long time, then finally squeezed out: “You… I admit you have a point.”

“Hehe…”

“In short, don’t learn anything from that Goathead in the future. He can’t teach you anything good,” Duncan sighed. Every time he talked with this doll, he felt his nerves being tested, as if he were making a sanity check. “Later I’ll set aside time to cram some common knowledge into you and think about your disguise. For now, you’re done here. Go make dinner.”

“Oh, okay,” Alice nodded hard. Just as she was about to leave, she seemed to remember something, turned back, and looked at Duncan curiously. “Then what are you going to do, Captain?”

“I have some things to discuss with Goathead,” Duncan waved his hand, looking tired. “Things that don’t concern you.”

Alice nodded and turned toward the cabin, in a very good mood, walking with light yet proper steps.

Duncan watched Miss Doll’s back as she left and could not help thinking again—

When she neither spoke nor turned her head, she really was elegant.

It was just a pity she had a mouth…