Chapter 3

Chapter 3: Lost at the Border

The wooden Goathead’s hard, dark face stared at Duncan sitting behind the chart table, and the obsidian eyes seemed to shine with an eerie light. In fact, the thing had no ability to show expressions at all, but Duncan clearly read a kind of expectation on that wooden face.

In fact, this was not the first time the Goathead had urged him to “set sail”. Every time he came here, the Goathead would urge him like this.

He even felt that the whole ship kept urging him, pushing him to end this blind drifting at sea as soon as possible and set sail back onto the right course.

But Duncan fell silent. Shadows passed over his naturally imposing face. As he pondered in silence, he clearly saw two problems:

First, he was the only person on the entire ship, and the ship was insanely huge. As a sailing ship, the vessel called “the Vanished” was at least one hundred and fifty to two hundred meters long, by Duncan’s rough estimate. To handle such a giant, you would need dozens, even hundreds of experienced sailors. How was he supposed to sail it alone?

Second, even putting those professional issues aside, there was still one key problem blocking his voyage—he did not know how to sail a ship at all.

Duncan grew a little anxious. He tried to imagine what would happen if he asked this eerie and noisy Goathead in front of him to teach him how to steer a ship. After imagining it, he felt even more anxious.

But the Goathead did not know what its captain was thinking. It just asked: “Captain, do you have any concerns? If you are worried about the Vanished’s condition, you can rest easy. The Vanished is always ready to sail with you to the world’s end. Or are you worried that today is an unlucky day to depart? I know a little of divination. Which kind of divination do you trust more? The stars, incense, crystals, all are fine. Speaking of crystals, do you remember…”

Duncan forced the muscles in his face to stay tight, holding back the urge to fight the Goathead to the death. He spoke in a low voice: “I’ll go to the deck and check the situation first—you stay here and be quiet.”

“As you wish—but I must remind you, the Vanished has been drifting blindly for far too long. You must take command of her as soon as possible and bring this voyage back on course…”

The Goathead finished speaking, and with more sounds of wood scraping, it finally returned to its original posture.

At once, Duncan felt as if the whole world had quieted down.

He let out a soft breath, and the throbbing in his head slowly calmed. Then he picked up the flintlock pistol on the table and rose to leave the captain’s cabin.

He had found this old-looking flintlock pistol while exploring the ship. Along with it, he had also found a single-handed sword, which now hung at his waist. These two items were his only sense of security when he moved around the ship.

During his explorations over the past few days, he had spent a long time roughly learning how to use them—even though, up to now, he had not seen any living creature on the ship besides himself.

Talking “objects” did not count.

The fishy, salty sea wind blew into his face, and his slightly irritated mood calmed with it. He stepped onto the deck outside the captain’s cabin and instinctively looked up at the sky.

Thick dark clouds still covered all the sky he could see. There were no sun, moon, or stars in the clouds, only a muddy daylight covering the endless sea.

This scene had lasted a long time. In fact, ever since the day Duncan came to the ship, this was the only sky he had seen. It even made him wonder if this world had no normal weather at all, and whether these packed clouds were the eternal sky over this sea.

Duncan turned around and saw the door of the captain’s cabin standing quietly there. On the beam above the door, a line of words was carved in letters he did not recognize. When he focused his gaze on them, however, their meaning appeared clearly in his mind:

“The Lost Ones’ Door.”

“The Lost Ones’ Door… the Vanished, hm,” Duncan muttered to himself, then added with a hint of self-mockery, “This ship really does have a good name.”

Then he walked around the captain’s cabin and climbed the stairs along the edge of the deck to the upper deck at the stern. There was a wooden platform here, the place with the best view on the ship aside from the lookout.

A heavy black ship’s wheel waited quietly on the platform for someone to take the helm.

Duncan frowned. For some reason, he suddenly felt a sense of urgency and restlessness, and it seemed to appear out of nowhere the moment he saw the wheel.

He had never felt this way in any of his previous visits here!

As if answering the anxiety in his heart, a sudden, chaotic wind swept across the deck, and the calm sea around them instantly broke into waves. The wind and waves were still not enough to truly affect the huge Vanished, but alarms rang in Duncan’s mind. The next second, driven by his instincts, he looked toward the bow.

On the sea directly ahead of the Vanished, between the hazy sky and water, a boundless high wall of white fog rose up as if from nowhere, like a barrier reaching the heavens, making his eyes widen at once!

It was white fog that looked as if it wrapped around and cut off the entire world, a sheer wall linking sky and sea and rolling toward them. More than its frightening size, what made Duncan (Zhou Ming) even more alert was that it instantly reminded him of the endless mist outside the windows of his apartment.

The Vanished was sailing straight toward that fog wall!

Duncan did not know what that dense fog was, or what lay inside it, but instinct told him it was extremely dangerous. His survival sense told him that being swallowed by that fog would be anything but good!

He rushed instinctively toward the platform with the helm—but a huge sense of helplessness fell over him at the same time. Even if he held the wheel, how could he alone steer this giant ship away from that fog wall?

But he still moved by instinct to stand before the wheel. Almost at the same moment, he heard a hoarse, gloomy voice come from a copper tube next to the wheel that was connected to the captain’s cabin. It was the Goathead’s voice—and this time, the eerie thing actually sounded a bit panicked:

“Captain, a Border Collapse has appeared ahead. We are approaching the limits of the Mortal Realm! Please adjust our course at once!”

Hearing the Goathead’s panicked voice, Duncan nearly burst into a curse—adjusting the course was easy to say. Why didn’t it conjure a hundred or so good brothers who could sail a ship and have them run this thing?

Then he looked up toward the masts and saw only a few bare poles standing on the deck. A wave of sorrow rose in his heart. Forget raising sails; the truth was that the ship did not even have sails. Those poles were completely empty!

In his agitation, he did not even have time to think carefully about the strange words the Goathead had just used. His instincts alone made him reach out and grab the wheel in front of him, which for some reason seemed to be trembling slightly.

For the first time in days, he had actively placed his hand on the Vanished’s wheel. Before this, the ship’s eerie condition and the Goathead’s constant urging had always left him full of doubts and resistance toward “taking the helm”. Now, he finally had no time left to hesitate.

He gripped the wheel tightly. His mind was blank, and he had no time to even think about how he could, alone, command an empty ghost ship.

The change came in the next instant.

A sound like mountains roaring and seas crashing exploded in Duncan’s mind. It was as if ten thousand cheering people stood on the shore sending off a ship, as if hundreds of shouting sailors on the deck were calling the captain’s name, with desolate sea songs and invisible stormy waves mixed in between.

A mass of green flame rose at the edge of his vision. Duncan instinctively looked at his hand and saw emerald fire burst from the Vanished’s wheel and sweep toward him with terrifying speed, spreading over his whole body in the blink of an eye.

In the blazing fire, his flesh-and-blood body suddenly became hollow and ghostly. The captain’s uniform turned tattered and ragged, as if it had been soaked in seawater for dozens or hundreds of years. Under the flesh that had suddenly become as unreal as a spirit form, Duncan could vaguely see his own bones. Flames danced on those crystal, jade-like bones, and the undying fire flowed through his body like water.

Yet he felt no pain or burning at all. In the roaring flames, he only felt his senses spreading out in all directions.

The fire swept down from the helm platform, flowed over the deck, over the rails, and over the masts. The flames wove together like a net, then rose from the deck as if breathing, climbing along the lonely masts and finally weaving between sea and fog into huge sails like misty gauze.

The Vanished had raised her sails at the collapsing border of the Mortal Realm.