Chapter 192

Chapter 192: Promised Ark

The cabin was as it had always been. sunlight drifting in from the Boundless Sea poured through the porthole into the room, making the old items that had soaked up a century of time shine with bright reflections. The black Goathead sculpture sat quietly on one corner of the enchanted sea chart table, steering the Vanished’s course.

On the surface of that ancient enchanted sea chart, thin mist rolled and billowed. Within the layered fog, the lines that marked the known sea routes were stretching straight ahead, extending toward a distant point.

At the end of that course lay the city-state of Pland. The flickering point of light that marked it had already appeared in the mist ahead and was slowly, almost imperceptibly, closing the distance with the Vanished.

The door opened, and Duncan’s figure appeared in the doorway.

The Goathead sculpture stirred at once. Its wooden neck creaked as it turned its head toward the sound: “Ah, the great Captain has come to his loyal deputy’s side! Has everything been going well? You have been busy since yesterday. Are you in a good mood today? The weather today is…”

“Stop, stop. You don’t have to repeat the same greeting several times every day.” Duncan raised his hand to cut him off before he could finish. Then his gaze stopped on Goathead’s face for a moment, as if by accident.

Goathead was as always. No expression showed on its face, and its obsidian-carved eyes were still strangely cold. From the tabletop it fixed its gaze on this side, its look filled with an inhuman quality.

But there was no hint of danger, and nothing different from usual.

This thing seemed to have been obeying Duncan’s orders in earnest. Duncan told it to focus on steering the ship, and it really only focused on steering the ship.

“Captain, you look worried?” Goathead’s voice sounded, carrying that familiar flunky-like enthusiasm. “You seem to have brought back some prisoners… but they don’t seem to be on the ship anymore?”

“They disappeared after the Sun rose,” Duncan said calmly as he walked unhurriedly to the chart table and sat down. “They were a few Enders.”

“Ah, Enders… such troublesome and dangerous fellows. They really are hard to catch. They always appear out of nowhere and then vanish just as strangely,” Goathead immediately started babbling, just as Duncan knew he would. Once a topic opened up, this thing would spit out a whole string of nonsense, though that nonsense often hid useful information, so there was hardly any need to question it carefully. “But how did they provoke you? Those crazy preachers don’t usually show themselves. Compared with the Suntists or the Annihilators, they are much more low-key and rare…”

“They attacked a human I was keeping an eye on, so I grabbed them on the way back and used them to test Alice’s abilities,” Duncan said casually while watching Goathead’s reaction. “They also said a lot of mystical nonsense about Subspace… how much do you know about these cultists?”

“I would advise you not to pay too much attention to their mad ‘preaching’,” Goathead said at once. “Just calling Subspace’s name too often can draw a dangerous gaze, let alone dealing with those madmen who follow Subspace. Of course, a Great Presence like you may not be affected by them, but listening to too much of it is never a good thing…”

Then it paused for a moment before speaking again: “Let me tell you, I don’t know that much about those madmen, and there aren’t many in this world who do. The Enders should count as the strangest group among all cultists. They are good at appearing and disappearing, their thoughts are broken and scattered, and unlike normal cults they don’t have large numbers of rabble at the bottom. There are far fewer of them, and there isn’t a single one you can talk to like a normal person…”

Goathead kept chattering, and the farther it went the more nonsense it piled up, but in that long-winded rambling Duncan still picked out some key pieces of information.

According to Goathead, the number of Enders was far lower than that of the other two cult forces that were also deadly threats to civilization, namely the Suntists and the Annihilators. Judging from records in the present world and their known activities, they might only number in the thousands, perhaps even less.

Ordinary cults had large numbers of ordinary people serving as the “believers at the bottom”. These rabble had no real power and lived normal social lives. Aside from their minds already being corrupted, they were basically no different from any other ordinary person. But the Enders had no such base layer. Whenever they appeared, they were all powerful “priests”.

No one knew how a heretic cult could operate and survive for so long without that sort of foundation, just as no one knew the exact process by which Suntists or Annihilators carried out their transformations among ordinary people.

In addition, although the word “preacher” sat right there in their name, they seemed to have almost no successful cases of actually “preaching”. Their sanity had long since evaporated, and their speech and logic were not like those of normal people. Whenever they appeared, they would mutter and chant “truths” about Subspace, but anyone with a sound mind would not fall for their bewitching words. As for people with weak wills… they would already have been corrupted by Subspace into monsters before they could be tempted.

In other words, in theory the Enders could not increase their numbers by preaching at all.

And lastly, the Enders appeared and vanished like ghosts. They were very, very elusive.

Duncan had already experienced that himself.

Goathead claimed that it did not know much about the Enders, but the information it gave was anything but little.

“A bunch of preachers so deranged they can’t even ‘preach’ anymore…” Duncan rubbed his chin and muttered to himself. “Then where did the very first Enders come from?”

“Who knows?” Goathead’s neck creaked as it swayed. “Maybe they just grew straight out of Subspace…”

Duncan did not bother with this obvious piece of nonsense, a “Subspace joke” from Goathead. Likewise, he did not bring up his own “nonlinear guess” about the Enders.

He only thought to himself that if someone like him, who had just had his first contact with the Enders, could already come up with such a guess, then what about the Guardians and Bishops in the human city-states, those who had long fought against heretics? How much did they know about those Subspace believers? Did they have a more complete theory to explain the strangeness of those madmen?

“Captain, you seem very concerned about those Enders?” In the middle of the silence, Goathead’s voice suddenly broke the stillness of the room. “I rarely see you with such a serious look on your face…”

Duncan lifted his head and looked at Goathead in silence.

“Tell me, if the history of a city-state has been corrupted, can it still be saved?”

He suddenly asked.

His tone was calm and casual, as if he was just discussing some ordinary “academic guess” in his spare time.

Goathead froze for a moment, though its stiff face had never really had much expression to begin with. It took two or three seconds before it answered: “History being corrupted? Oh, that’s a high-level topic. It sounds like the kind of thing only Subspace could pull off…”

“Only Subspace could do that?” Duncan raised an eyebrow. “Why do you say that?”

“Besides something as dangerous as Subspace, where time and causality are a tangled mess to begin with, what else could casually Corrupt the history of a city-state?” Goathead said offhandedly. “Nothing in the mortal world has that kind of power… oh, if we are only talking about sheer power, there might be one thing that qualifies, but that thing is hanging up in the sky…”

Listening to Goathead’s muttering, Duncan felt his heart give a jolt.

Time and causality inside Subspace were chaotic?

This was the first time he had heard such a clear and direct piece of information about Subspace.

Along with this information, another memory rose up in his mind, of what the Frostholm Queen had once said to him in that illusory scene—

Do not Corrupt history.

He frowned and forced down the tangle of thoughts in his heart for the time being, letting his gaze fall back on Goathead. The latter at once noticed the Captain’s gaze, stopped babbling, and quickly reacted: “Ah, no wonder you suddenly care about those Enders… could it be that they…”

“They probably pulled off something big,” Duncan said in a low tone. “And it makes me a bit… uneasy.”

He looked quietly into Goathead’s eyes, and Goathead stared back at him without expression. It felt as if they were watching each other, yet there seemed to be no other form of exchange.

“City-states have their own Guardians, and those Flamebearers are always watching the flow of history,” Goathead finally said. “No matter what trouble those Enders stir up, they can’t threaten you. Even if they can Corrupt history, they can’t Corrupt you or the Vanished…”

Duncan raised an eyebrow. “They can’t Corrupt me or the Vanished?”

“…We returned from Subspace, Captain,” Goathead said slowly. “Everything in the world can be corrupted—except Subspace itself. And we… have stayed in Subspace long enough.”

Duncan frowned again. For some reason, some of the insane words the Enders had said suddenly surfaced in his mind.

After a short silence, he could not help but murmur under his breath: “Promised Ark…”