Chapter 317

Chapter 317: Facing Terror

Everywhere on this ship carried the colors of his memories—but the longer Tyrian stayed aboard, the more he realized that many things here were still different from what he remembered.

For example, the objects that seemed alive and ran all over the ship.

For example, the sails that had lost their solid form and now drifted around the masts like misty veils in a spirit form.

And for example, the unfamiliar First Mate in the captain’s cabin—the strange carving Father called “Goathead.”

He sat opposite the chart table, looking at the things in the room that were both familiar and not. Many of them still matched his memories, only now they carried many mottled traces of time. Father sat across from him, talking about what had happened between the Deep Sea Church and the Vanished. The Inquisitor from Pland sat by Father’s side, adding details from time to time.

The way things had changed was far beyond what he had expected.

“A… Secret Envoy,” the pirate lord repeated the term Vanna had just used. His tone was strange and his expression was subtle. “The Church is acting… with more boldness than I imagined.”

“To be honest, it surprised me at first too,” Duncan said with a smile. “That Pope is a… very hard person to read. I do not know how much of what she says is from her true heart, and how much is for the Church’s interests and under the guidance of the storm Goddess Gamona. But in any case, how this matter has developed fits what I wanted—I do need a bridge who can talk with the Churches of the Four Gods, and a helper who is good at dealing with cultists.”

“Dealing with cultists…” Tyrian showed a thoughtful look. “I still remember you mentioned those Annihilators, and the clues you found on the Obsidian…”

“Bringing you here is exactly for this,” Duncan nodded lightly. Then he took out the tobacco tin from his clothes, opened the lid, and showed what was inside to Tyrian. “This is the clue I found deep inside the Obsidian—the flesh of the Abyssal Lord.”

Tyrian held his breath. He knew that with Father here it should not be dangerous, but at the moment the box opened he still felt a bit tense without meaning to. Right after that, he saw the “chunk of meat” inside, only the size of a thumb.

An unspeakable fear and sense of rejection rushed up in his heart almost at once. It was like the instinctive bristling of hair when a person, unarmed, suddenly met a wild beast in a narrow path. The lump of flesh only lay lifeless in the metal box, yet he still felt as if he were being stared at, locked on by some living existence with huge power and a towering will!

Tyrian almost snapped his gaze away at once. When he came back to himself, he realized that cold sweat was already running down his forehead.

“Are you all right?” Duncan noticed his state and frowned a little. “Why is your reaction even stronger than Morris and Vanna’s?”

Still shaken, Tyrian blurted out: “They didn’t react this strongly?”

“We felt resistance and danger, but it wasn’t that intense,” Vanna said at once from the side. “What did you feel just now?”

Tyrian calmly told them what he had felt in that brief moment. Then he frowned at the piece of flesh again as countless thoughts rose in his mind.

“I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but I kept feeling this thing… was staring at me just now,” he said. “As if it were still alive… or something ‘behind’ it was casting its gaze here.”

Duncan and Vanna exchanged a glance at once.

Bringing Tyrian here had indeed been the right choice. Without actual contact, some clues in the details really would have been hard to bring to light.

This piece of flesh, suspected to be a fragment of the Holy Lord, showed a special reaction to Tyrian’s approach and gaze!

“Could it be because you took part in the Abyssal Trench Project back then?” Duncan thought for a moment and spoke his guess. The Abyssal Trench Project was, as far as he could see, the biggest special factor in Tyrian’s past connected to this matter.

Tyrian did not speak for a moment. After recalling and thinking for a few seconds, he raised his head: “Can you be sure that the Obsidian really went to the Frostholm Deep Sea?”

“I can’t, because there is no direct proof. But my intuition tells me it returned from there,” Duncan said honestly. “The traits the ship showed are far too much like the ‘replica’ you described.”

Tyrian said nothing for a while. He only stared at the small black iron box on the table, as if weighing and hesitating. After who knew how long, he suddenly spoke: “Can you let me look at it one more time?”

“Are you sure?” Duncan looked into Tyrian’s eyes. “This could be dangerous. If it really was the Abyssal Trench Project that made you and this thing connected, then every contact you have with it will only strengthen that link.”

Tyrian stayed silent for two seconds, then suddenly showed a slight smile: “…On your ship, things shouldn’t get as bad as they possibly could, right?”

“…If something really does come out, I will deal with it,” Duncan nodded slightly and pushed the small tin box, which he had just taken back, toward Tyrian again. “Act carefully. Give a warning at once if anything happens.”

Tyrian nodded, took a light breath, and again fixed his gaze on that piece of flesh from the Abyssal Lord.

Almost in the blink of an eye, that feeling of rejection and tension rose in his heart again. The sense of being gazed at from afar by a towering existence slammed hard into his senses. The link built by an supernatural power washed over his mind like a huge storm wave. His survival instincts almost made Tyrian shut his eyes at once.

But this time, he forced himself to fight his instincts. He did not look away, and he did not try to break or push back the will that was rising in his mind.

And in this longer stretch of holding on, he finally confirmed what he had only vaguely sensed before—

The will and power coming from this “Holy Lord’s flesh”… actually held no malice.

All the fear, danger, and rejection he felt came only from the natural awe brought on by such a vast power. The gaze hidden on the other side of the flesh… was actually just a pale, exhausted look.

Tyrian’s heart stirred. He raised his head, ready to tell Father what he had found.

Yet in the next second, he found that around him was only dark chaos—the familiar cabin and the people in the room had vanished from his sight at some point.

He stood up in shock and reached for a weapon by instinct, only to realize that he was unarmed. He carefully looked around, trying to see things in this dark chaos, but it felt as if a black veil covered his sight. Even when he held his hands in front of his eyes, he could only see vague shapes.

There was a strong mental interference. Something was using mental guidance to disturb his consciousness.

But he still did not feel any malice.

Tyrian stood in the darkness, a little lost. Suddenly, he thought he heard a sound.

There was a faint rustling behind him. Something huge was moving. A slightly cold breath drew close to the back of his neck.

Tyrian’s heart tightened at once, and he whipped his head around.

A huge, strange limb stretched out toward him in the dark, black?brown with faint blue lines running through it.

The limb was like a tentacle, yet it was hundreds of meters long. It lifted in the darkness like a soft pillar. The shapeless bulge at the end of the tentacle came to less than a meter from Tyrian’s face. Farther away along that limb, in the direction the tentacle stretched from, an even larger, even more unspeakable structure was slowly rising out of the dark!

It was like a mountain, like a city, like some twisted thing that could drive a mortal mad in an instant. It almost should not have been shaped by the world of the Mortal Realm at all, nor could it be any God’s creation made in a sane mind. It was like some soft?bodied creature from the Deep Sea, like a mix of sea star and squid, but in the next second its smoky, mist?like surface surged. Countless more tentacles, limbs, eyes, and throats grew from it, and they changed without end.

In that short moment, Tyrian’s eyes were open as wide as they could go. A roaring storm of thoughts shook in his head. He did not even know if he felt fear right now, and for a time he could not judge his own emotions at all. He only stared as the tentacle stretched toward him and gently waved in front of him, as if it wanted to talk to him, to pass on some message. But he could not understand any of it in that mountain?high, sea?like flood of information and roaring.

Eyes opened on the surface of that tentacle—many, many eyes. Tyrian met those eyes, and suddenly he seemed to finally “hear” some message he could understand from them, and from the huge, mountain?like “body” in the distance—

“…Run.”

Boom!

A terrifying roar exploded in his mind. It felt like some huge repelling force was tearing his spirit loose and hurling it back into the Mortal Realm. Tyrian almost blacked out on the spot. Just as he thought his soul was about to be torn into pieces in this endless dark chaos, a dim green flame suddenly appeared in his sight.

The flame rushed toward him with a howl and wrapped tightly around him.

All the horrifying images vanished in the fire.

Before he could react, those terrible “visions” and sounds had already faded like a dream—he was back in the captain’s cabin of the Vanished.