Chapter 239

Chapter 239: fallen relic.

The Radiant Star’s speed slowly dropped. In the end, the ship stopped carefully on the sea a few hundred meters from the glowing, half-transparent “cliff face”.

But compared to the size of that colossal object, a few hundred meters was almost nothing. To Lunie, it still felt as if the Radiant Star had already come right up against the cliff. The towering geometric body before them loomed like a mountain, pressing down with a crushing sense of scale. If an ordinary person stood here… they might already be struggling to breathe.

“…It’s really spectacular,” the clockwork automaton could not help saying as she craned her neck. “And it’s very beautiful.”

The thing really was both spectacular and beautiful. Ignoring its strangeness, it could have been called a magnificent wonder, enough to give a great artist the greatest inspiration of a lifetime, or enough to make a poet compose countless verses.

It looked like a sharp-edged mountain carved from clear pale golden amber, or like an especially regular geometric iceberg. It drifted in the water, surrounded by a misty glow. The thin fog in the area slowly flowed along its surface, tracing out a dreamlike aura.

And all signs showed that this thing really was as “dreamlike” as it appeared. It had no solid body. Even though it clearly existed there, it seemed to be nothing more than a massive shadow.

“Mistress,” Lunie could not help turning her head. “What do you think this thing is?”

“…I don’t know. I only know that it fell from the sky.” Lucretia admitted frankly. She recalled the scene when the Radiant Star had first begun to track it. It had been the day before yesterday, in the last few hours of daylight. While on patrol, the Radiant Star had seen a huge, hazy glowing orb suddenly fall from the sky, tear through the clouds, and vanish into the depths of the border sea. From that moment on, she and her ship had been following it.

But aside from the obvious fact that it had “fallen from the sky”, she knew nothing about this phantom visitor from beyond the world.

Lucretia carefully studied the base of the huge geometric body and confirmed one more thing:

This thing was light, very, very light. It floated on the sea, with only a small part of its lower half dipping into the water. Yet that slight sinking still showed that this “phantom” thing did have some mass and was not just a flat shadow.

Having at least some mass meant it could be bound by matter in the Mortal Realm… With the Radiant Star’s power, maybe they could even tow it away.

Could they drag it back into the territory of the civilized world and assemble a truly professional team to study it? The Explorers’ Association would likely be happy to help…

But that was only theory. How could they actually do it? How do you drag a gigantic phantom that things could pass through? Or… was there some solid core deep inside this glowing geometric body, and that was where its mass came from?

Lucretia’s thoughts raced. Lunie’s voice sounded at her side: “Should we try exploring the inside?”

“We start with caution.” Lucretia spoke as she lifted her hand and bit her finger. A drop of blood welled from her fingertip and slowly floated forward. Halfway there, it suddenly burst with a “pop” into a dramatic cloud of smoke.

When the smoke cleared, another “Lucretia” appeared in the wheelhouse – but it was only a ghostlike phantom. She wore a torn, deathly white long dress. Her face was stiff and grim. Her whole form was half transparent, drifting eerily in midair.

Lucretia nodded to the phantom. Without a word, the ghost turned around and flew toward the “mountain” a few hundred meters away.

Lunie watched, slightly tense, as the ghostly double swept over the foggy sea and then slipped without a sound into the inside of the “mountain”.

Nothing happened.

“Mistress?” Lunie looked back at her master. “What is inside?”

“Light and heat. Very warm, but not scorching. Bright, but not blinding… Inside there is no wind or waves. The sea surface below seems even calmer than ‘outside’,” Lucretia said, speaking slowly as she carefully sensed the information coming from the phantom double. “For now it looks like at least the shallow layer of the ‘mountain’ is safe. I’m speeding up toward the inner part.”

Lunie nodded. Though she was only a clockwork automaton, she had a “soul” closer to that of a human than any other crew member on the ship. At this moment, she could not help feeling nervous. She reached back and turned her own key twice to relieve the tiny shiver running through her inner parts from the tension. After that, she waited for a long time before she finally saw her mistress’s expression change.

Lucretia frowned slightly and looked up ahead.

“I’ve reached the deepest part,” the “sea witch” said. “There is a core.”

“A core? What kind?”

“A huge stone sphere,” Lucretia said, looking a bit puzzled. “Or at least, it looks like it’s made of some stone-like material. Gray-white, with many regular grooves on the surface. About ten meters in diameter, floating in the air above the sea…”

As she spoke, Lucretia furrowed her brow and focused, as if she were giving new orders to the ghostly phantom that had entered deep into the glowing geometric body. Then she went on: “It can be touched. It’s solid.”

“It’s solid…” Lunie froze for a second. Years of working together let her understand at once what her mistress meant. “You want to… drag it back?”

“The elven scholars of Lightwind Harbor should be interested in this thing,” Lucretia said calmly. “The lines on the stone sphere’s surface have a clear pattern and hide a complex geometric structure. I guess… someone good at mathematics could see something in it.”

“Then how are we supposed to ‘drag’ it back?” Lunie stared at her mistress in disbelief. “With a rope or a chain? We do have spare anchor cables on the ship, but they might not be long enough – the projection of that glowing orb is too big. The distance from here to its core probably already exceeds the limit of the cables…”

Lucretia silently watched the glowing “mountain”. After half a minute, it was as if she had made up her mind: “We’ll go in and pull it.”

“…Are you serious?”

“My curiosity is up.”

“…All right, you are serious.”

…

Duncan lay asleep in the captain’s quarters of the Vanished and had a short yet bizarre dream.

It was unbelievable. This body of his hardly needed sleep at all, much less dreamed. In fact, ever since he had come to this ship, he had never once “dreamed”. The body in Pland had experienced some scattered and messy dreams, but none had ever been as clear or as deeply etched in his memory as this strange short dream.

In the dream, he saw meteors – meteors that appeared suddenly in broad daylight.

He stood at the bow of the Vanished. The whole ship was dead silent. He could not hear Goathead’s nagging in his mind. He could not hear Alice’s daily racket on the deck as she fought with buckets and mops. Even the entire Boundless Sea was silent, with no waves and no wind.

The whole world seemed to have fallen into deathly stillness. In that silence, a huge glowing orb fell from the sky – also silent and soundless.

glowing orbs fell one after another, striking the calm surface of the Boundless Sea. They were enormously huge fallen relics, yet they did not stir up even the slightest ripple, as if one phantom were falling onto another. Those glowing orbs gradually began to fall like rain and finally turned into a terrifying and grotesque meteor shower. Countless glowing orbs slowly covered the entire sea surface, surrounding the Vanished in a field of radiance.

Yet as the countless glowing orbs fell, the sky grew dimmer and dimmer. By the end of the dream, as the meteor shower slowly faded, the sky had become pitch black.

At the end of the dream, Duncan raised his head and saw that only a single dark red, mottled, horrible hole remained in the heavens, like an ember not yet gone cold in the dark. It hung there like a dying eye, quietly staring down at all things in the world.

Duncan snapped his eyes open. The deep impression left by that absurd nightmare still burned strongly in his mind.

He was shocked that he had actually dreamed on this ship, and even more shocked by the strange scenes he had seen in the dream.

A silent world, silent meteors, a sky of dead darkness, and that terrible hole in the heavens, staring down like an eye… Why would he dream of something so strange? What did this dream mean?

Duncan slowly calmed his breathing and sat up in bed, rubbing his forehead in irritation.

On this eerie Boundless Sea, on the Vanished, he could not bring himself to believe that a dream was just a simple dream. Something must have affected him, or his own “intuition” must have sensed something, for him to see that scene in his sleep.

As he brooded in agitation, he frowned slightly.

Was it related to the “World Countdown” he had just learned about? Was it connected to the “truth” of the world’s Doomsday that the “Captain Duncan” from a hundred years ago had touched?

Was it just his mind connecting the dots after suddenly learning all that, or was it the remaining memories in this body stirring up again? Was his contact with Tyrian and Lucretia related to this dream?

Duncan tapped his forehead lightly with his fingers, then reached toward the bottle on the cabinet beside the bed, planning to use a bit of alcohol to steady his nerves. But just as he stretched out his hand, his gaze swept across the Chronometer Clock on the wall not far away, and his movement stopped.

The hands on the Chronometer Clock had stopped.

They had stopped at the moment when there was still one minute before sunrise.

Outside the window, everything was dim. He could not see the glow of dawn, yet there was also no cold light from the World’s Wound.

The flame of the oil lamp in the bedroom was the only “living thing” still burning calmly, but the light it cast seemed faintly pale, making the room’s illumination feel a bit strange.

Duncan’s gaze moved calmly over all of this, taking in every unusual detail.

Something was obviously wrong… Was he still dreaming?

He quickly ruled that out. With his mind clear again, Duncan could still tell whether he was dreaming or not.

He frowned and held himself back from the impulse to open the window and look at the outside of the ship. Instead, he got up and walked to the wooden door of the bedroom.

He would go to the enchanted sea chart room first and see if Goathead knew what was going on.

He opened the door to the enchanted sea chart room and looked toward the chart table where the enchanted sea chart and Goathead should have been.

Goathead was not there.