Chapter 295

Chapter 295: Departure

Oh no.

At the first glimpse of that warped radiance, the old caretaker realized that through his own carelessness he had fallen into extreme danger. On this freezing winter night, some unimaginable, unnameable being had come knocking at his door—and even worse, just a few minutes ago he had burned powerful incense to dig secrets from the souls of the cultists.

That incense was strong enough to build a Deathbed Illusion in the minds of the dead, shaped exactly as the caster desired. It could also greatly expand the caster’s range of perception and sharpen the mind. With its help, he had managed to pick out the aura of demons from the Abyssal Deep from the faintest ripples of thought in the two cultists.

But the side effect was that his Spirit Sight had been pushed to a higher level for a short time. Because of that, he now faced the visitor’s true form almost defenseless.

The brilliant, twisted starlight churned wildly outside the door, faintly sketching a huge, giant?like presence. A roar like ten thousand overlapping howls rampaged through his mind, every cry as if it would tear his soul apart. The old caretaker stood stiff as stone as he watched one strand of starlight reach toward him. At its tip, the light suddenly blossomed, and it seemed that countless eyes rolled and turned inside it.

Duncan looked at the old man holding the shotgun in front of him, then leaned to glance past the old man’s shoulder.

He saw the two bodies on the floor, already lifeless.

The cultists had been dealt with. This old man, who looked so frail, clearly had more strength than Duncan had expected.

“Looks like you’ve already taken care of the trouble. That’s good,” Duncan said with a smile and a small nod. “I came to help, actually. I was worried you might be in danger…”

As he spoke, he lowered his head to glance at his current state and quickly added: “Ah, I know I look a bit scary right now, and very suspicious. There are complicated reasons for that—the situation was urgent, so I had to borrow a body on short notice, and its quality isn’t very good. This body is slowly falling apart. But don’t worry, old mister, I’m not a bad person…”

In the booming roar inside his skull, there seemed to be fragments of human language mixed in. A few understandable words, tangled with a flood of vast knowledge, rushed through all his senses. In that invisible storm, the old caretaker faced the star?bright giant and realized the visitor was speaking to him.

The nameless being who had come in the winter night seemed to want to talk to him.

But he could not make out anything clearly.

There was only one thing he knew for sure—he was the graveyard guard.

He could not let such a suspicious being stay on land meant for the dead to rest.

The old man’s muscles were locked, but he still slowly raised the double?barrel shotgun in his hands. Under the crushing mental pressure and the wild disturbance in his thoughts, he aimed the barrels at that “individual” who felt as powerful as a deity.

“Leave,” he mumbled. Then he raised his voice: “Leave! Do not disturb them!”

Duncan frowned.

But he soon understood the old caretaker’s fierce reaction—after all, in his current state he really did not look like a good person.

His whole body was smoking. His skin was splitting inch by inch. Every move he made scattered half a pound of coal dust. The fact that the old man only pointed the gun at him and did not fire at once almost proved that the shotgun was probably empty…

“I should be going,” Duncan nodded and stepped half a pace back, not offended at all by the old man’s anger. “I just came to confirm how things were.”

He could feel that this body’s collapse had reached its limit. His spirit, projected from the Vanished, was slowly peeling away from this shell that was about to fall apart.

“This was my first visit today. Things were quite chaotic, and a lot of accidents happened,” he said to the old caretaker with a small smile. “But talking with you earlier was rather pleasant. I hope next time we can meet in a calmer, steadier setting. Goodbye.”

His spirit withdrew from the shell. The body, which had already died from demonic backlash during a symbiotic pact and had been crumbling ever since, finally gave out completely. Once Duncan stopped forcing it to hold together, it toppled backward, and the moment it hit the floor it shattered into a heap of dry, cracked charcoal.

The unnameable being suddenly left. It had really gone.

The old caretaker felt the huge pressure in his mind vanish at once. The maddening noise disappeared too. The twisted starlight before his eyes faded in a blink, and a hollow ringing rose up to take its place. Wrapped in that constant ringing, he lifted his head and looked around. In the light of the gas lamps, the graveyard paths stretched away into the distance. On both sides of the paths, overlapping shadows seemed to hide countless twitching and jumping shapes. Near and far, the biers looked piled with twitching limbs and crawling shadows. Pairs of eyes blinked in the dark, each pair almost human yet not quite.

He shut his eyes tightly and silently repeated the name of God of Death Bartok. A few seconds later, he opened them again.

The strange scene in his vision was still there, but it was slightly better than before. At least now he could see more of how the Mortal Realm ought to look. He could see the lines between the path and the biers.

It was an echo of madness—the good news was that it was not madness without end, and not madness that would last forever.

The old caretaker looked down the path and saw a pile of bizarre charcoal scattered by the roadside. Then he looked toward the distant bier, but he could barely tell what was really there.

The pale light of the World’s Wound shone on this world.

His long experience turned into a clear judgment. He did not know how long his madness would last. If he kept moving around in this state—his judgment weakened and his mind ready to worsen at any moment—it could only lead to unpredictable results. He was not even sure that, the next time he raised his gun, he would be aiming at the living instead of the dead.

The unnameable being had left. From the view of a Higher-Order Entity, it had done no harm to this place at all. That meant it might be some sort of friendly existence. So at least for a while, nothing else was likely to invade the graveyard.

Any further investigation would have to wait until the Sun rose.

After thinking for a moment, the old caretaker turned and went back into the hut. He quickly locked the door and, while fighting the dizzy spell and ringing in his ears, locked the windows as well. Trusting his memory, he picked out herbs and Holy Oil from among the blurred shadows and writhing things his eyes showed him, and sprinkled them in the four corners of the room. Only after he finished did he walk to the center of the room. He pushed the still?warm corpse off the chair and onto the floor, sat down himself, hung a Death God badge on his chest, held the double?barrel shotgun in his arms, and quietly waited for daylight.

…

In the captain’s cabin of the Vanished, Duncan let out a slow breath and glanced to his side.

AI was tilting its head as it studied him. Then it suddenly spoke: “Our warrior is fighting the enemy… The battle is going terribly for us!”

“Alice is fighting something again?” Duncan listened to the sounds outside. From the deck came faint clanging and the doll girl’s occasional exclamations, but that kind of noise had long since become part of daily life on the Vanished, so he did not pay it much attention. He only shook his head: “Let her be. She’ll quiet down after fighting for a while.”

He rolled his slightly stiff neck and lifted his head to look out the window.

Dawn had not yet come. The Boundless Sea was still wrapped in darkness.

At the far end of that darkness lay Frostholm.

This rushed trip to Frostholm had not gone well. He had not even found a body he could use for long, and in the end he had not managed to leave the graveyard at all.

Still, even if things had gone badly, his efforts had not been for nothing.

Duncan thought back over his time in the graveyard and sorted through the information he had gained.

The Annihilators who followed the Abyssal Lord—that was the part that most deserved attention.

Four cultists had disguised themselves as priests of the God of Death, sneaked into the graveyard during the strictest hours of curfew to steal a corpse, and even given up their lives for it… That was no small matter.

It was easy to foresee that, after sunrise, what had happened in the graveyard would come to the attention of the authority in Frostholm and the local church, and it would stir up at least a small wave among the church’s guardians.

And of course, the “dead man” who had climbed out of a coffin would also draw the local church’s eye.

That temporary body…

Duncan’s brows slowly drew together.

That corpse clearly had something wrong with it. It was not only that four Annihilators had risked everything in the middle of the night to steal it. The real problem was the strange way it had later “broken apart.”

Duncan looked down at his own hands.

He still remembered very clearly how that body had collapsed. This was not his first time using a corpse, but it was the first time he had seen such a bizarre disintegration. Back in the sewers of Pland, even that sacrificial victim with no heart had never shown anything this strange.

At the same time, Duncan recalled one line the cultist had let slip without thinking:

“This body is almost at its limit.”

Those Annihilators clearly knew something. They had already been expecting the body to fall apart.

Duncan raised his hand and slowly rubbed his chin.

While he guessed at the cultists’ goals, he also thought about something else.

Were these unusual things… somehow linked to that “friend of True Resurrection” that Morris had mentioned?