Chapter 316

Chapter 316: Going Home

The mood on the deck suddenly became a bit awkward. An unspeakable silence hung between Vanna and Tyrian. The shock on Tyrian’s face had not yet faded, while Vanna was already covering her forehead with her hand.

The silence was finally broken by a voice from not far away. A few meters off, Shirley nudged Nina with her elbow and said: “See? I told you his first words would definitely be that—you owe me two scoops of ice cream.”

“Fine, fine, you guessed right,” Nina muttered. “Two scoops it is… I’ll buy them for you when we get to Frostholm.”

Shirley’s eyes went wide at once: “I’m not stupid! Eating ice cream in a place that’s dozens of degrees below zero? We’ll wait until we’re back in Pland!”

Tyrian blinked and only then noticed the other people on the deck, and how the mood here was subtly different from what he had imagined. First he saw the girl named Shirley, whom he had met once before. Then he saw, by her feet, the Abyssal Hound that had once knocked heads with him, lazily basking in the Sun. A little farther to the side stood another young lady who looked sixteen or seventeen, and an elderly gentleman with graying hair and a gentle, scholarly air.

Everyone was smiling.

Behind them were the deck, rail, masts, and sails of the Vanished.

The yellowed, broken scenes from his childhood, the memories of him and his sister fooling around, every happy and unhappy impression, seemed to float up bit by bit from some dark, forgotten cave, slowly gaining color again in the sunlight shining through the thin mist.

There were some new faces here, but this was still the ship in his memories—not the gloomy, ruined, twisted ghost ship he had first imagined.

At least, the deck still looked just as familiar.

Tyrian knew he was spacing out, and he knew he ought to say something at a time like this, but he could not stop his thoughts from wandering. He knew he had had this habit since childhood. Every time he stared off into space on the deck, Father would always appear out of nowhere and scold him from behind—

“Tyrian, what are you daydreaming about here?”

The pirate captain visibly flinched. For a moment, the confusion between memory and the Mortal Realm made his thoughts freeze for two or three seconds. Then he slowly turned around and saw a tall, imposing figure standing behind him.

It was not a phantom in a mirror, not a blurry outline seen across a distant sea full of cannon fire. They were standing face to face…

“Sorry, Father,” Tyrian blurted out. “I was a bit distracted.”

Duncan frowned slightly.

He was not sure if it was just his imagination, but in that instant he felt Tyrian’s state was somehow strange, very different from the impression left by their last few encounters, and yet faintly familiar. Soon, though, he let it go.

After all, this was their first face?to?face talk after a hundred years apart, and also Tyrian’s first time back on this ship. It was normal for him to react like this.

At the same time, Vanna, who had been silent for a long while out of embarrassment, finally spoke: “Captain Tyrian, I should explain who I am here. First of all, it is not what you think. I came to the Vanished by order of the Church…”

“By order of the Church?” Tyrian was even more confused than before. He suddenly turned his head to look at his Father: “You…”

“I did not bring down the Church—watch where your thoughts are going, Tyrian,” Duncan cut him off before he could speak, already knowing what he was thinking. “Do I need to stress it again? I am no longer an enemy of the civilized world. You should face me more calmly, not like you are on guard against some calamity that might start destroying things at any moment.”

Tyrian said: “I… I’m sorry.”

“I accept your apology—let’s talk as we walk,” Duncan waved his hand and started toward the stern. “We have a lot to discuss. Why Miss Vanna is here, what happened with the Obsidian, and that dagger?shaped island.”

Then he turned back and waved at the onlookers nearby: “Anyone not involved, go mind your own work. Stop crowding around here.”

Still a bit dazed, Tyrian followed behind Duncan toward the captain’s cabin he remembered, while Vanna walked silently on the other side.

The scenes in his memory and the sights before his eyes came together and broke apart, sometimes overlapping, sometimes clashing with sharp, jarring differences.

From the very start of his return to the Vanished, everything already seemed to have slipped away from its old track and from his expectations.

Tyrian looked around without thinking. He studied the state of the ship, searching for things that matched his memories, and also searching for a figure who, in theory, should be here.

Of course Duncan noticed his little movements: “Are you looking for Alice?”

Tyrian paused, then remembered that this was the doll girl’s name—he had always thought of her as “Ray Nora”: “Ah, yes. Is she on the ship?”

“She is, but she should be busy in the kitchen right now,” Duncan nodded. “Alice is in charge of the food on the ship. You can try her cooking today—we have fresh vegetables and fish that were just caught. You don’t often see that on an ordinary long?distance voyage.”

“The food…” Tyrian repeated the word without thinking and almost said, “So Father eats regular meals too.” The next second, a series of startled cries and hurried footsteps suddenly came from not far away, cutting off his wandering thoughts.

“Help help help help help help help——”

That was Alice’s scream.

Tyrian turned in shock toward the sound and saw that doll girl who kept calling him “brother” running across the deck not far away, shouting at the top of her lungs with a kitchen knife raised in her hand. Right behind her bounced a wooden barrel, hopping up and down. The barrel was full of carrots and greens.

Duncan watched, expressionless, as Alice ran back and forth across the deck, as Nina and Shirley rushed over to help and failed, until it turned into three people and one dog racing around the deck, chased by a barrel of vegetables. Then he patted Tyrian on the shoulder.

“Sometimes, it gets a bit lively around here.”

Tyrian turned back with a blank look, the corner of his mouth twitching: “…Are the ingredients on this ship maybe a little too fresh?”

“It’s because of the barrel—it has its own ideas about how vegetables should be stored, so it often has… differences of opinion with Alice.”

“You don’t need to help?”

“No. Alice has a big heart.”

“But it looks like she’s asking you for help…”

“It’s fine. I have a big heart too.”

Tyrian’s expression seemed to freeze. Even as a pirate leader who commanded a whole Undying fleet, he still could not quite keep up with the Vanished’s daily pace.

Duncan was not surprised at all. He just patted Tyrian’s shoulder and said: “You need to learn to get used to it. If I helped every time Alice shouted for help, I would never get anything else done. As it turns out, her ability to adapt and her life force are both quite tough.”

Tyrian still wanted to say something, but they had already reached the captain’s cabin.

In all his childhood memories and in his memories as an adult, this had always been the most impressive place on the whole ship.

When he was a child, Father’s captain’s cabin was a mysterious and slightly scary room. He and Lucretia could fool around in most parts of the ship, but they were strictly forbidden to step into this place. Even the kindest sailor on the ship would block the two siblings at the door without mercy.

After he grew up, Father’s captain’s cabin became a place that made people tense and where they had to stay serious. Even after Tyrian and Lucretia each became captains of the Sea Mist and the Radiant Star, they still felt nervous by instinct whenever they stepped inside. Here, Father drew up all his great plans of exploration. Here, he marked on the enchanted sea chart the islands and Visions newly found by the Vanished fleet. Here, he planned and directed the entire fleet. Most of the time, he and his younger sister only listened and carried out orders.

Father did not like other people’s suggestions. In his memory, Father was a decisive and stubborn man.

The door opened, and the slightly dim interior, compared to the deck outside, came into Tyrian’s view.

The next second, his gaze went to the edge of the chart table, to the black, eerie Goathead there.

The black Goathead, with its wooden texture, creaked as it turned. Its pair of hollow, deep obsidian eyes fixed on the visitor who had just stepped inside.

“Hello, nice to meet you for the first time, Mr. Tyrian.”

Tyrian was startled and turned his head without thinking: “This is…”

“This is the current First Mate on the Vanished. You can trust him,” Duncan introduced. “You can just call him Goathead.”

“First Mate?” Tyrian blinked, then turned back to look at the strange “wood carving.” Pushing down the odd feeling in his heart, he accepted Father’s words and tried to greet it: “Hello, Goathead… Mister?”

Goathead shook its neck, as if about to say something, but the next second Duncan, very used to this, cut in first: “Be quiet. Stay silent while we are talking.”

Tyrian glanced at Duncan in surprise.

“When you talk to it, you must get used to cutting it off ahead of time—do not let it talk freely. That is my advice.”

Hearing Father’s warning, Tyrian’s expression quickly grew serious.

If even the mighty “Captain Duncan” treated this so strictly and carefully, then this Goathead really must be as strange and dangerous as it looked.

Naturally, Tyrian took Goathead to be some kind of extremely dangerous Anomaly, and keeping its mouth shut was clearly part of the sealing rules for that Anomaly…