Chapter 264

Chapter 264: The Captain’s Warning.

To be fair, Vanna had hardly been afraid of anything in her whole life, but Captain Duncan Abnomar always seemed able to bring her all kinds of “unexpected situations”.

The room was sealed inside a dream. Outside the window stretched a boundless dark sea. A strange glowing orb hung high in the sky, and under the silent veil of night, someone knocked on the door.

Vanna almost reacted on instinct. She wanted to call her greatsword into the dream and leap toward the doorway with a heavy chop. Luckily, she held back that impulse at the last second.

“Knock, knock, knock.”

The knocking kept coming, unhurried and steady, full of patience and politeness.

Vanna took several deep breaths. She had no idea what kind of expression she should be wearing, so she simply kept her face tense and tried to make her voice sound normal: “Please come in.”

With a soft click, the handle turned. The dark wooden door was pushed open from outside. A very tall, imposing figure appeared before Vanna and stepped into the room.

Behind that figure there was only pure darkness, like the very edge of the dream—and beyond that edge, nothing at all existed, only void.

Duncan walked into the room and gave Vanna a friendly smile: “Good afternoon, Vanna—this time I did knock.”

Vanna said nothing. She just watched the ghost captain walk in. She watched him go to the liquor cabinet by himself, take out a bottle and two glasses, then slowly walk to the table and sit down in one of the armchairs.

“Not coming over to sit?” Duncan raised his eyebrows and glanced at the young Inquisitor still standing by the window. He gestured toward the empty seat across from him. “The look on your face is not very good.”

Vanna hesitated for a moment, then finally walked over with a strange expression. She sat down carefully while watching him pour the drink. After a long pause, she sighed: “Do you not think this is actually even more frightening?”

“Is it?” Duncan looked at Vanna with some surprise. Then he glanced around at the dream he had spent quite a while setting up—the warm, everyday furniture, and the glass in his hand that was meant to show friendliness. Not very sure of himself, he frowned. “Then next time I can try a brighter color scheme…”

“I do not think it is a color problem…” Vanna felt even her eyebrows twitch. But then something came to mind, and she sighed with a helpless little smile. “All right, at least I can tell I really did feel your ‘goodwill’… This goodwill is a bit scary, but I can more or less believe it is real.”

Duncan pushed a glass toward her: “Sounds like a good thing.”

“Thank you.” Vanna took the glass and looked at the clear liquid with its faint golden?red tint. She hesitated for a long time, then set it aside for now. After that she raised her eyes and looked at the captain across from her: “This is another dream—is this one of the rooms on the Vanished?”

“It is based on one of them, but not completely. I arranged it according to my own taste,” Duncan said slowly. “I am actually not very good at Dreamweaving. I prefer to enter an existing dream directly. But you were sleeping very uneasily. Your dreams were broken and chaotic, so I prepared a place where you can rest properly.”

Vanna did not care much about Duncan’s last sentence. She turned her head to glance out the window and asked the biggest question in her mind: “That glowing thing in the sky outside… what is it? Is that also one of your ‘personal tastes’?”

Duncan fell silent for a moment. His gaze turned to the window. Under the pale light he stayed quiet for a long time before he sighed softly and shook his head: “You can say that. I do not really like the pale, icy glow of the World’s Wound. It is not gentle, and it feels full of malice. As for what you see now… you can call it the ‘Moon’.”

“‘Moon’…” Vanna slowly repeated the strange word that sounded like it was taken straight from some unknown language. “That is a very awkward name to say.”

“You are interested in it?” Duncan looked at Vanna with a faint, amused smile. “Then I can tell you the story behind that name…”

Before he even finished, Vanna shivered all over and sat up straight: “No! Thank you!”

“…All right, it is always like this.” Duncan shrugged, not really bothered. “They are only very ordinary things. They have nothing at all to do with Subspace.”

“Sorry. I do believe you are very friendly, but… just think of me as cowardly,” Vanna said awkwardly. After so many meetings and the chain of events they had gone through, her wariness and guarded attitude toward this ghost captain had already changed quite a bit without her noticing. But even so, from a logical, rational point of view, Vanna still did not dare to listen lightly to ‘knowledge’ coming from the mouth of this man who had returned from Subspace. “Let us talk about something else instead. Why did you come to me?”

“Two things.” Duncan met Vanna’s eyes with his gaze. “First, I want to thank you all for taking care of Tyrian these last two days. It seems he had a rather pleasant stay in Pland.”

“Captain Tyrian?” Vanna’s heart jumped. She suddenly realized something. “So you have been watching this whole time…”

“Yes, I have been watching this matter,” Duncan said, his tone full of feeling. “He wandered in the north for many years and picked up bad pirate habits. Most of the time he only has a group of undying sailors for company. His social habits are very unhealthy. And because of that old business in Frostholm, you cannot help worrying about his mental state. To keep him from turning into a reclusive, bitter cynic, he needs some healthy and orderly relationships…”

Duncan was basically just making things up as he spoke. He only wanted to further shape his image as someone who had “regained humanity, reason, and clarity”, so it would be easier to deal with Vanna and the “orderly civilization” behind her. But Vanna did not take this as nonsense. She sat there stunned, listening to this ghost captain ramble like an old Father lecturing his child. After a long while she finally squeezed out a sentence: “You… actually care about him a lot…”

Duncan stayed serious: “Family members caring for each other is the first step to maintaining harmony in the family.”

“…But you almost blew the Sea Mist into a pile of scrap iron,” Vanna reminded him carefully.

Duncan kept the same serious face: “Proper discipline and mental guidance are the second step.”

Vanna: “…”

Weird, off, and full of strangeness—Vanna felt more and more that her conversation with Captain Duncan was filled with an indescribable sense of oddness. Yet somehow, in the middle of this strange and mismatched talk, she truly felt… that this ghost captain was becoming more “flesh and blood”.

She had to shake her head and push this sudden thought aside for now: “Then what is the second thing you mentioned?”

“The second thing,” Duncan straightened his expression and became a little more serious, “is about the Sun—have you noticed the change in it?”

At some point, the sound of the waves outside the window had grown quieter, like distant murmurs. The breeze blowing into the room also became faint and thin.

When she heard him mention the Sun, Vanna’s eyes changed a little: “Do you mean the sunrise that was delayed by fifteen minutes, or…”

“The outer rune ring. There is a gap in it,” Duncan said. “From the look on your face, you all noticed it too.”

Vanna stayed silent for two or three seconds, then nodded lightly: “It is hard not to notice. Even though it is a flaw barely visible to the naked eye, for thousands of years there have always been watchful eyes on the running of Vision 001. The Church noticed this disturbing change at once.”

“The Guardians never relax… that makes my opinion of you a bit better,” Duncan said, then suddenly asked, “What do you all think about it?”

“…That depends on what feedback the Storm Cathedral gives,” Vanna replied in a strict, by?the?book tone. “Here in Pland, we can only report what we have observed. We are not a research facility, and we cannot think of any way to intervene in the running of Vision 001.”

She paused to think, then shook her head slightly, not very sure: “Maybe even the Storm Cathedral will not give any clear feedback. Vision 001… its running affects the whole world, and its abnormal state has alarmed more than just the Deep Sea Church.”

While she spoke, Vanna seemed to realize something and raised her head to look at Duncan: “You suddenly came to talk to me about this. Does that mean you know something? Do you know what went wrong with Vision 001?”

Duncan did not answer right away.

He could not help recalling that short, strange dream he had once had.

In that dream, gigantic glowing orbs fell like a meteor shower. The whole world slowly sank into darkness. In the sky there was only terrifying, dreadful darkness left, shaped like a hollow… or like a dying eyeball.

At the time, he had not understood anything from that dream. But now it felt as if he had glimpsed a trace of a prophetic vision in it.

“Even I cannot be sure, Vanna,” he finally broke the silence and calmly met Vanna’s eyes again, his gaze steady. “But I think this is only the beginning.”

A chill slowly spread across her back. Vanna felt she had seen something extremely disturbing in his eyes: “Only the beginning?”

“I still do not have enough proof, but I suspect that Vision 001 actually has a ‘service life’,” Duncan said solemnly. “What the ancient kingdom of Critt left to later generations was not an eternal shelter, but only temporary peace. The Sun above our heads… is very likely about to break down.

“As for when the proof of this will arrive…”

Duncan paused for a moment, then said slowly:

“Maybe huge fragments will fall from the sky, and that will be the ticking of the countdown.

“More likely, the first fragment has already fallen, only it fell outside the sight of the civilized world.”

Cold and unease spread in her heart. Vanna lowered her eyes a little to hide all the changes in them. Her hand slowly picked up the glass beside her, and she raised it to her lips without thinking, as if she wanted to use the alcohol to steady her mood.

She took a sip, frowned a little, and looked up at Duncan: “There is no taste…”

“Of course there is no taste,” Duncan laughed and raised his glass to her in a small toast. “Because you are about to wake up.”

Vanna’s eyes flew open.

She was still sitting in the moving steam car. The tall tower and main building of the Cathedral had appeared in her view.

She panted slightly and heard her subordinate’s voice coming from the front: “Ah, you are awake. Perfect timing, we are almost at the Cathedral.”