Chapter 302

Chapter 302: .

The deck of the Obsidian was small and easy to take in at a glance, so the group quickly finished searching the whole area and found nothing suspicious.

Apart from the places that should have been damp and full of puddles now being oddly dry, the Obsidian’s deck looked no different from that of an ordinary wrecked ship. It was heavily rusted, uneven, and damaged in many spots, but overall it had not yet reached the point of total collapse.

After checking the deck, Duncan decided to go inside the ship and take a look.

They soon found a large door that led into the cabins.

It was a rust-covered iron door set into a white wall. The handle had rotted badly, and the lock had long since been ruined by seawater. The whole door was shut tight and clearly could not be opened by normal means.

Morris stepped forward to check the door, then gave up on opening it normally. He turned to the others and said: “We might have to use a bit of force.”

“I’ll do it,” Vanna volunteered before anyone else could speak. “Everyone step back a little so you don’t get hit by debris.”

Shirley and Alice quickly did as they were told and backed far away. Duncan hardly moved. He only stepped aside two paces so his clothes would not get dirty, then watched Vanna with curiosity. He saw the sturdy woman walk up to the big rusted door and then… casually knock on the door panel with her hand.

A sharp hum rang out, and the center of the iron door simply shattered into a gaping hole. The solid, heavy steel broke into countless fragments that flew in all directions, and dust billowed from the opening.

Then Vanna reached out and tugged at the edges of the hole a few times, tearing the remaining steel plates from the frame as if she were ripping paper. She tossed the pieces aside.

Shirley and Dog stared, dumbfounded, for a long moment before they finally blurted out together: “…What the hell, is she even human?”

Of course Vanna heard them. She turned her head and smiled: “I work out regularly.”

Shirley’s mouth twitched. She muttered under her breath: “This has nothing to do with working out anymore…”

Duncan also admired Vanna’s simple and brutal solution. But he had already seen this fearless maiden fight her way through an entire city, so he did not react much. He only raised his head to look at the smoke-filled doorway and asked: “What is it like inside?”

Vanna waved a hand, waited for the dust to settle a little, then leaned in to look. Her expression immediately turned strange.

A few seconds later, she stepped back and turned to Duncan: “Inside… there’s another door.”

“Another door?” Duncan froze for a moment, then walked over in a few quick steps to see for himself. Sure enough, another rusted metal door stood right there, only a few meters behind the one they had just broken.

Yet the space between the two doors was not a corridor, nor a foyer, nor any kind of designed safety buffer. It was just an empty space, with no equipment or furnishings and no extra windows, only bare walls and a ceiling that, for some reason, looked crooked and skewed.

“…I am not sure if this is the Obsidian’s normal layout,” Morris said after coming over for a look. He shook his head. “Before this, I only knew of the ship. I had never seen it in person.”

Duncan frowned slightly, then quickly nodded to Vanna: “Open that door too.”

Vanna stepped forward at once and repeated the process, smashing the second door. Then she leaned in again, and turned back with a stunned look: “Inside… there’s another door.”

“Another one?!” Even Shirley was surprised this time. She forgot about keeping a safe distance and dragged Dog over. “Whoa… there really is another one?!”

Behind the second door was a third door, with the exact same layout and the same strange little “compartment” in between.

If there had only been a second door, they could still have explained it away as some special design of the Obsidian. But now a completely useless, senselessly eerie third door had appeared… It was hard to brush this off as just “an advanced design concept” for the ship.

“The structure of this ship is wrong,” Duncan said. He looked back at the two doors behind them, his expression turning a bit more serious. “Whether it’s normal or not, it should not have a layout like this… Vanna, open this door as well.”

“Alright.” Vanna did not hesitate. She stepped up and punched the third door. This time she stopped after opening a large hole and did not bother to clear the remaining steel from the frame, because she could already see what was inside through the gap.

“Cap…tain,” she said, still not quite used to the title. Her expression turned even stranger than before. “It’s a wall inside.”

“A wall?!” Duncan’s eye twitched. He looked through the hole and saw exactly what Vanna had described.

There was indeed only a wall opposite the door, less than half a meter away. It was almost pressed right up against it. The space between the door and the wall was meaningless and too narrow to hold anything.

“How could a ship be designed like this?” Nina muttered in confusion. “Three doors, and behind them is just one wall… Then where are the cabins? How are we supposed to get into them?”

Duncan did not answer. He only looked quietly at this oddly structured “overlapped area”, his eyes thoughtful, as if something had occurred to him.

After a moment, he nodded to Vanna: “Keep opening it.”

Vanna stepped forward at once. She first kicked away the remaining lower half of the third door, then slammed her fist into the strange wall. A much larger hole appeared with a thunderous boom.

“It’s a corridor,” Vanna said after taking a look inside. She turned to the others as she spoke.

“Great,” Shirley breathed out in relief. “Finally something that looks normal…”

“It’s upside down,” Vanna went on before Shirley could finish. “The ceiling is under our feet, and the floor is over our heads.”

Shirley muttered: “…What the hell.”

As Vanna had said, behind the wall there was only an upside-down corridor. Just like the three repeating doors, there was nothing normal about the layout inside this ghost ship at all.

“This ship has been twisted…” Even a well-read scholar like Morris looked a bit lost now. He stared in disbelief at the corridor beyond the wall and muttered to himself: “What could have warped the Obsidian into something like this…”

“Think about it another way,” Duncan cut off the old scholar. “Is this really the Obsidian?”

Morris looked up sharply, staring at Duncan in shock: “You mean…”

“We are near Frostholm, and something terrible once happened in the Deep Sea beneath Frostholm,” Duncan said casually. He glanced at Alice, who was looking around curiously. “Do you remember what Tyrian said back then about the ‘Abyssal Trench Project’?”

“I remember, I remember,” Alice said, nodding quickly. “And a whole bunch of submersibles and so on…”

“It’s enough that you remember that much,” Duncan said as he pressed down on Alice’s head. “Stop nodding. You’re starting to wobble.”

Then he raised his hand and knocked on the wall beside him.

The metal bulkhead gave off a hollow thump under his knuckles.

“It looks normal on the outside, but inside it’s a complete mess. Crude imitation and copying, internal spaces stacked together in the wrong way. This should not be the real Obsidian, though it’s hard to say which ‘number’ Obsidian this one is.”

Alice had no idea how much of that she actually understood. She only drew out an “Ohhh” and nodded slowly in a very serious way. It was Vanna, standing beside her, who reacted quickly: “But I remember you once said that back during the Abyssal Trench Project, only the crew members inside those rising submersibles were distorted during the copying process. The submersibles themselves were copied correctly. You guessed back then that this kind of error should be limited to people or other living beings…”

“Yes, it was limited to humans or other living bodies, at least it was like that half a century ago, when the Queen of Frostholm was still alive,” Duncan said slowly. “So the situation is clearly worse now. The copying is no longer limited to Submersible Three, and the distortions have spread to inanimate matter. Whatever lies in the Deep Sea under Frostholm has clearly started moving again after fifty years of silence, and its range and intensity are far beyond what they were half a century ago.”

Shirley blinked as she listened. Everyone on the Vanished had heard the story of the Abyssal Trench Project from the captain, so they all knew how strange and cursed it was. That made her mutter without thinking: “I… I’m starting to get nervous…”

“Think about it another way. The captain is the one investigating this. I don’t think we’re the ones who should be nervous,” Dog whispered too. “Stop scaring yourself. My heart rate is going up with yours.”

Shirley froze: “Dog, you have a heart?”

“I’m a demon with a heart!”

“A heart and ‘having heart’ aren’t the same thing. Isn’t your chest cavity empty?”

“…What if it isn’t? Maybe there’s something in there jumping around.”

“Want me to dig it open and check?”

“No way.”

Duncan paid no attention to the increasingly morbid whispers beside him. After making a quick guess about the ghost ship’s condition, he turned his attention back to the corridor, which might lead who knew where.

After a brief moment of thought, he stepped toward the large hole Vanna had made: “Let’s go in and see what’s going on.”