Chapter 267

Chapter 267: Beneath the Darkness

The bottom of the “model” was growing.

As Zhou Ming–Duncan’s thoughts spread, the structure that represented Pland’s Undercity slowly surfaced in his mind. The parts that appeared in his awareness now turned into corresponding new parts on the “collection” itself.

It was something rough, like a disk of rock, growing at a speed visible to the naked eye. It covered the entire underside of the Pland city-state and then began to extend further, showing more bizarre details—layers of sediment built up over hundreds of years, small spiky growths like fine thorns, and between those layers of sediment, twisted, coiled… strange protrusions.

It felt like the coarse skin of some echinoderm, or the ugly outer layer left on rock after strong acid had corroded it.

At last, the growth stopped.

The “model” that represented the city-state of Pland now had a disk-shaped base at its bottom.

But Zhou Ming frowned.

He could feel that his awareness spreading through Pland had not stopped. It was still extending “downward”.

In the darkness, in the cold, in a Transcendent Perception beyond the ordinary five senses and six faculties, he felt his spirit continue to sink like mercury seeping into soil. He clearly sensed his “gaze” pass through thick layers of concrete, soil, and rock, and then pass through some extremely dense “shell” that was neither metal nor stone, until it sank into icy seawater. Then it kept going down, and down.

In only the blink of an eye, he felt he had plunged into a pitch-black Deep Sea, passing the 850-meter-thick base and following some invisible but real “path” as it stretched rapidly downward.

And after that, how far did it go? One hundred meters? Two hundred?

Zhou Ming could not be sure. He only knew his perception was still spreading downward. He had already moved beyond the range of the city-state of Pland, and no new structure appeared on the “collection” in his hands, yet his thoughts still flowed along some invisible “medium”.

His first reaction was, of course, tension. He instinctively tried to control this trend of falling toward the Deep Sea. But before he could do anything, that constant “falling” suddenly stopped.

It was as if he had crashed into some invisible “limit” or reached the end of the “medium”. His perception finally settled in deep water at some depth beneath the city-state and stayed there.

Zhou Ming felt his heart pounding. It was the feeling of suddenly falling, only to be yanked to a stop halfway down by a rope. The sharp rise and drop shook him. It took him nearly half a minute to calm down and steady his breathing and heartbeat.

Then he composed himself again, slowly picked up the Pland model in front of him, and looked at the thick “rock disk” spreading outward under its base.

The structure was rough and ugly, yet overall it was fairly regular. Its underside was a jagged broken face. It felt… as if it had been forcibly snapped off from something else, or as if its growth from top to bottom had been interrupted, leaving behind an ugly break.

The inside of the disk was a murky, chaotic mess, impossible to sense clearly or see through.

But Zhou Ming did not focus on the disk base itself. Instead, he looked at the empty space under the base.

A part of his extended “consciousness” now hung suspended at that spot.

Zhou Ming closed his eyes slightly.

In the next second, the distant perception suddenly grew stronger.

He felt he was in the dark, icy Deep Sea. An immeasurable volume of seawater wrapped around and pressed down on him layer after layer. The pressure was so real that it felt as if even his consciousness was being restrained and bound. He tried to open his “eyes” in that darkness, but he saw only endless nothing.

As time passed, tiny specks of light seemed to appear in that emptiness.

Were they some kind of plankton in the Deep Sea? Some school of glowing fish? Or something else?

Zhou Ming struggled to make it out for a long time before he realized… he was looking at the bottom of Pland.

He was “looking up” at Pland and seeing the underside of that rough disk base. In the extreme darkness, there were a few small glowing structures on that base.

He still could not tell what they were. With only pure mental perception, across such a vast distance and through such thick seawater, the information that could reach him was far too vague.

After that, Zhou Ming slowly adapted and tried to shift his attention in another direction—toward the deeper seabed below.

All he felt was endless emptiness and endless darkness.

There seemed to be nothing in the Deep Sea.

But after a while longer, he suddenly sensed something faint.

Something enormous, utterly still, maybe even as huge as Pland itself, lay sleeping in that boundless darkness.

Zhou Ming could not see it or hear it. The extreme darkness and silence hid every detail of that giant presence. Yet he could be sure that something was there, motionless and dead-quiet, as if it had existed since ancient times.

He did not know how long passed before he finally pulled back.

In the end, he still could not “see” what actually lay in the Deep Sea directly beneath Pland.

But he faintly understood one thing—

That vast structure hiding directly under the city-state was probably the reason Queen Ray Nora of Frostholm had stubbornly pushed the Abyssal Trench Project half a century ago.

There was something under Frostholm. There was something under Pland. Under the other city-states… there was probably something too.

Zhou Ming let out a slow breath, stood up, picked up the Pland city-state model, and walked to the storage shelf at the far end of the room.

The model now had a “base”, but it could still fit into the cubby on the shelf—as if, from the very beginning, both the model and the cubby had left enough space for it.

But before he put the model back, Zhou Ming’s eyes fell again on the space under the base, and a trace of doubt rose in his heart.

His awareness could spread through the city-state, but in the Deep Sea, his awareness had clearly gone beyond the physical limits of this model. Its physical base ended after 850 meters, yet his awareness had continued downward for another hundred or two hundred meters. How did those last hundred or two hundred meters extend? What was that invisible medium?

Zhou Ming slowly put the model back onto the shelf.

…

The Sun once again rose into the sky as usual.

In front of the antique shop in Pland’s Lower City, on the small open space, Duncan watched Nina ride a bicycle in a cheerful circle, then pedal up and down the street before finally stopping steadily in front of him.

“Uncle! I’m already really good at this!”

Nina planted one foot on the ground, her face bright with excitement and pride.

Duncan smiled a little: “Not bad. You really are getting good at riding—but you stopped with your wheel on my foot.”

Nina quickly looked down and, in a panic, rolled the wheel off his shoe: “Ah! I’m sorry!”

“It’s fine.” Duncan waved his hand with a smile. Then he let out a breath and lifted his head to look at the street in the sunlight.

The city-state was the same as always.

Under the street bathed in sunlight, the deep darkness and massive Shadows below felt like something from another world. They had not affected people’s daily lives at all.

But ever since he finished his exploration of what lay “beneath” Pland, he could not help thinking of that cold, dark Deep Sea, and of the vast structure he had sensed in it.

It made him drift off in thought again and again.

He even could not help wondering if the queen of Frostholm half a century ago had been the same. Had she also found some way to glimpse the secrets in the Deep Sea… maybe even more than he himself had seen?

“Uncle, you’re spacing out again?”

Nina’s voice came from beside him, cutting off Duncan’s wandering thoughts.

“Are you all right? You’ve been distracted since this morning.”

“I’m fine,” Duncan waved his hand quickly. Then he looked toward the end of the street, as if to change the subject: “But speaking of which, Alice still isn’t back.”

“She just left not long ago,” Nina said casually. “And you don’t have to worry so much, do you? She only went to buy a newspaper. It’s not like she has to cross half the city. She shouldn’t get lost, right?”

“I really can’t relax,” Duncan sighed. “This is her first time going out alone in the real sense—even if it’s only to the newsstand at the corner.”

“I think it’ll be fine,” Nina thought for a moment and answered very firmly. “Before she left, I went through it with her many times. How to tell people what she wants to buy, how to get change, how to say thank you after taking the newspaper… She learned all of it.”

“I hope so,” Duncan sighed. “It’s just that when she first came aboard the ship, even going to the kitchen to get a plate meant getting hit with a frying pan.”

Nina froze for a second: “I don’t think you can treat those two things as the same…”

While they were talking, Alice’s figure appeared at the edge of their sight.

The doll girl was hugging a newspaper to her chest. Her face shone with a bright smile. She held her neck stiff and ran toward them in little jumps, shouting as she ran: “Mr. Duncan! I got the newspaper!”

Nina laughed: “See? I told you Miss Alice would definitely be fine!”

But when Duncan saw the way Alice ran, he was instantly alarmed. He hurried forward to meet her and shouted: “Don’t run! Slow down!”

As the saying went, you worry about exactly what ends up happening. In the time it took him to say that, he watched Alice trip and go down flat on her front less than five meters away from him, sprawling across the ground.

Yet the very next second, the doll bounced back up as if nothing had happened. She patted off her skirt, picked up the newspaper from the ground, and walked over to Duncan with a beaming smile: “Newspaper!”

Duncan did not take the newspaper right away. Instead, he stared in disbelief at the doll girl whose head was still attached. After a long moment, he finally managed to say: “…You fell that hard. How did your head not come off?”

Alice kept that confident, neck-straight pose, her face glowing with pride: “I found a good way to reinforce it!”

Duncan eyed the doll suspiciously: “A good way?”

Alice said: “I used glue!”

Duncan: “…?!”

He stared at her in shock for two or three seconds, then could not help asking: “Who taught you that?”

“Shirley!”