Chapter 243

Chapter 243: Return.

Zhou Ming stood in front of the mirror, quietly letting his gaze rest on his reflection.

The mirror world was so clear and so real that if he had not reached out and touched a cold, hard surface, he would have suspected that another self was truly standing opposite him.

After a long time, he finally drew his gaze away from the mirror and looked at the vast darkness around him.

How big was this space? If he kept walking outward, could he walk to infinity? What was the nature of this dark space? Why did it appear here, behind the Door of the Lost Ones? What connection was there between this Door of the Lost Ones in Subspace and the Door of the Lost Ones in the Mortal Realm? And, most important of all…

What were those words that appeared in the darkness?

Zhou Ming walked away from the mirror. As he left, the mirror quietly faded, and the figure within it vanished into the darkness. With his steps, more pale words appeared in the dark, describing everything about him.

They were like an extremely detailed personal file, a dossier recorded in some crucial database, though he had no idea what it would be used for.

Zhou Ming felt that even his power of imagination was not enough. He tried to find a reasonable explanation for what he saw, but no matter how he reasoned, in the end it all looked like wild fantasy.

He even started to feel that there might be a “Doomsday shelter plan”, and he was someone who had hidden in the shelter without knowing it. That studio apartment was his protective fortress, and the words appearing in this dark space were the registration dossier he had filled out before entering the shelter…

In the darkness, his thoughts flowed out of control. But after an unknown time, he suddenly gathered up all his wild ideas.

“…I have wasted enough time.”

He muttered the words softly.

There were no more clues here, only phantoms that could shake his mind. Whether this dark space really hid a huge secret, or whether it was just another scheme and lure from Subspace aimed at him, he should not stay here and get lost in it.

Zhou Ming took a slow breath and let his mood gradually calm. Then he decided to run one last test and one last exploration in this dark space before he left.

He walked toward the distance, cautiously and carefully moving away from the door.

More words appeared under his feet. Their content was similar to before, but more detailed and more formal, more and more like registration data used in an official setting.

As Zhou Ming silently memorized these words, he kept turning his head from time to time to confirm his distance from the door and to make sure he had not lost his sense of direction in the darkness.

He grew more and more cautious as he walked. In the end, each step moved him forward only a dozen centimeters.

Suddenly, he noticed a change in the words appearing under his feet.

“The situation of ?#%… whether % @#?”

“?@* was probably between 355 and *&, and there might be &…% of %&…”

The words began to grow messy. The sentences became strange and hard to understand. The once clear and smooth records turned into something he could hardly read at all.

Something stirred in Zhou Ming’s heart, but he did not stop moving forward. He only walked even more carefully. As he kept going toward the edge of the darkness, more words surfaced in the dark.

They became stranger and more chaotic, and the confusion grew at an exponential rate. At first he could still see a few meaningful words in each sentence, but soon it reached the point where several sentences did not contain a single readable character. After that, he could not even see the “nonsense symbols” anymore.

What emerged from the darkness was no longer words and symbols, but a series of twisted, leaping lines, restless points of light, and even trembling projections that seemed to almost break the rules of geometry.

As he walked forward, chaotic lights and shadows that a mortal mind could hardly understand appeared in the darkness. They looked like unspeakable reflections at the edge of the universe and turned into a path that stretched out under his feet.

At last, even the chaotic lines and jumping points of light disappeared. Nothing new appeared.

Zhou Ming stopped at once.

He had not yet lost his reason. He had not become obsessed with the constant search toward the unknown.

He looked back. The door he had come through had almost shrunk to a hazy point of light, but it still stood quietly in the darkness.

Zhou Ming turned around decisively and started back. No matter what else lay deeper in the darkness, the moment the information beneath his feet came to an end, he knew he could not go any farther.

He walked back faster than he had come. It did not take long for him to cross that empty darkness and return to the Door of the Lost Ones that led to the Vanished.

When he laid his hand on the door, the solid touch gave Zhou Ming, who had been wandering and exploring in the darkness for a long time, a strange sense of steadiness. Then he took a light breath and stepped through the door.

A slightly cool sea breeze blew against his face. The bright daylight that suddenly filled his vision made Duncan a little uncomfortable for a moment. The faint rocking under his feet and the sound of waves crashing at his ears reached his senses a fraction of a second later. Perhaps he had stayed too long in a place of total silence, because when the sound of the waves appeared, it felt almost like thunder.

Duncan suddenly froze.

He checked his surroundings and saw the familiar Vanished, the familiar Boundless Sea, and the Sun hanging in the sky, bound by double layers of runes.

He had returned to the Mortal Realm.

This unexpected situation left him a bit dazed. Just a second before he stepped through the door in that darkness, he had still been thinking about how to keep exploring the “broken Vanished” to find a way back. He had not thought that going through the door from there would send him straight back to the Mortal Realm. What was the rule behind this?

To return from that “broken Vanished”, which seemed to be in Subspace, to the Mortal Realm, did he only need to use the Door of the Lost Ones as a transfer point?

He turned around thoughtfully and saw that he was standing before the captain’s cabin. The Door of the Lost Ones stood quietly in the sunlight, and the words on its frame shone in the bright sky.

Duncan’s thoughts suddenly became very active.

There were many doors on the Vanished, but only three were special. The first was the Door of the Lost Ones. The second was the gloomy wooden door deep in the cabin that led to the lowest hold, marked with the words “The Last Door”. The third was the door standing in midair at the center of the lowest hold, which connected Subspace and the Mortal Realm and could perhaps be called the “Door of Subspace”.

Yet on the “broken Vanished”, both the Last Door that led to the lowest hold and the Door of Subspace had the marks on their frames wiped away. Only the Door of the Lost Ones in front of the captain’s cabin kept the exact same appearance in both the Mortal Realm and Subspace.

Now it seemed that this “consistency” might have pointed to the true “exit” from the very beginning.

With a faint answer forming in his heart, Duncan let out a breath, then stepped forward and pushed open the door of the captain’s cabin.

After he crossed the threshold, he confirmed that there was no darkness on the other side, but his studio apartment. Everything in the room was normal.

Then he returned to the ship again and, this time, pulled open the door of the captain’s cabin.

There was the familiar enchanted sea chart room, the familiar tasteful furnishings, the familiar table, and on the table, the familiar Goathead.

For the first time in his life, seeing Goathead still resting properly on the table gave him a sense of reassurance.

As soon as Goathead heard the sound at the door, it turned its head at once. A creaking noise of wood rubbing on wood came from its neck as it asked: “Name?”

“Duncan Abnomar. It’s me, I’m back,” Duncan said at once. He had already guessed that the other party would ask for confirmation. This Goathead could sense whether he had left the Vanished and might even sense certain “changes” in him to some extent. Its “name checks” seemed random on the surface, but there was a faint pattern to them. “I went very far away.”

“Ah, Captain, you finally came back!” Goathead cried in an exaggerated and eager voice. It was as noisy as always. “You suddenly left the ship completely, and you really scared me! When you walk in the Spirit Realm, at least you leave your body here. But just now all your presence disappeared… and now you are coming back from the deck? Where did you go?”

All presence gone? Completely left the ship?

Duncan’s eyes changed slightly for a moment.

So he really had entered that place that was likely Subspace with his true body, not with the “projection of consciousness” he had first assumed.

He raised his head and looked into Goathead’s pitch black eyes. After a slight hesitation, he said: “Don’t be scared when you hear this.”

“Ah, do not worry. Your First Mate is not only loyal and brave, but also brave and loy…”

“I went to Subspace.”

Goathead: “…?!”

It took a full half minute before the thing suddenly let out a cracking sound, its neck almost twisting off, as it cried: “Cap… Cap… Captain? You said you…”

“I went to Subspace, if I did not go to the wrong place,” Duncan said as he walked into the captain’s cabin and casually picked up the consecrated lantern from the nearby shelf. “Wait for me for a moment.”

Having said that, he did not wait for Goathead to speak. He grabbed the consecrated lantern and left the captain’s cabin, almost rushing through the deck and the layers of cabins straight toward the lowest level of the Vanished.

He passed through the Last Door and came to the shattered lowest hold.

Between the gaps in the hull at the bottom, everything still looked dim and chaotic. Within the limited field of view he could not see many details, only the turbulent currents of light and shadow and occasional flashes jumping and flowing in the darkness.

And the most dangerous Door of Subspace stood quietly at the center of the cabin.

The door was tightly shut, with not even a crack.