Chapter 320

Chapter 320: Protocol Twenty-Two.

The last corridor leading to the engine room was hot and dim. The endless mechanical vibrations and roaring sounded as if they wanted to drill into a person’s skull. The lights on the walls seemed to have trouble with the air currents, and the flames inside their glass covers shook and flickered.

But all of this was nothing compared to the growing sense of wrongness and tension pressing down on him, and the dizziness from his thoughts slowly tearing apart.

Belazov controlled his steps and controlled his expression.

The closer he came to the deepest part of the Sea Swallow, the more he forced his stride to stay steady, his face as calm as usual.

Several crew members were standing in the corridor talking. They wore strange leather “coats”. The skin on their faces folded in heavy wrinkles, and their voices sounded like a low buzzing noise.

Belazov walked toward them. His mind told him that these crew members were soldiers under his command, but he could not remember their names at all.

“General?” One soldier stepped up, looking at Belazov with curiosity. “Do you have any orders?”

“I’m just here to check on the engine room,” Belazov answered this unfamiliar soldier with a calm face. “Stay at your posts.”

The soldier looked at him, then saluted and stepped back. “Yes, General.”

Belazov walked through them with his usual steady stride. He could feel those soldiers’ eyes rest on him for a moment, but they soon turned away.

Were they really his soldiers? Were they really crew of the Sea Swallow? Or were they that hidden thing? Or some kind of servants? Had they noticed something? Or were they already on guard? In the next second… would these soldiers whose names he could not remember suddenly throw themselves at him?

Belazov pushed all these thoughts down into his heart. He kept them buried until he reached the entrance to the engine room and opened the unlocked gate.

Even harsher machine noise rushed out to meet him.

The steam core was running at full power. Inside the spherical container, amazing, surging force was brewing. The complex pipe system hissed along the ceiling of the engine room. Huge connecting rods and gears were spinning quickly in the steel frame at the far end of the chamber.

The machine was running very “happily” – so happily it almost felt manic.

It was as if a restless soul was pushing those heavy steel gears into a wild spin, driving the ship at its limit toward the cities of the civilized world.

Even the hissing from the steam pipes seemed to be mixed with vague, whispering voices.

Belazov’s body swayed a little, but he quickly steadied himself and walked toward the steam core.

A priest stood before the valves, swinging a censer. He suddenly turned his head and looked at the General who had just stepped into the engine room. The Church badge on his chest seemed to be stained with oil, making the holy symbol on it blurred and unclear.

“General?” The priest looked at him with curiosity. “Why did you suddenly come here? This place…”

“I came to take a look… at the state of the steam core,” Belazov said, and his gaze fell on the censer in the priest’s hand.

The little ball of flesh hanging there swayed gently in the air. A pale eye opened on its surface.

He raised his head again and looked at the running steam engines and the hissing pipes.

The steam leaking from the pipes carried a faint red tinge. The edges of the rapidly spinning gears were blurred and twisted. It seemed something was living inside this huge system of machinery, and its malicious soul had replaced the holy steam that should have been there.

The machines were already under corruption. They were in a state of desecration – this thought rose in Belazov’s mind for a second, then was blown away like smoke.

Even so, he still walked toward the control console of the steam core. Even though this huge “steel heart” now looked completely normal to his eyes, he slowly reached out his hand toward the controls.

“General,” an artificer with oil on his clothes suddenly walked over from the side and raised a hand in front of the control levers. “Please don’t touch these. Machines are sometimes very fragile.”

Belazov lifted his head and gave the artificer a look.

The artificer only met his gaze calmly.

Then, all of a sudden, the artificer’s lips moved slightly.

Belazov frowned a little and read several words from the movement of those lips:

“The machine is possessed. It cannot be shut down or destroyed.”

Belazov froze for a moment. Then he saw the artificer turn sideways. While the man adjusted the levers, his lips continued to move, very slightly.

“The priest cannot be trusted… the situation is in a runaway state… Protocol Twenty-Two.”

Protocol Twenty-Two?

Belazov’s heart tightened, but soon he knew what he had to do.

The artificer understood the ship’s “heart” better than anyone.

He turned and left the engine room. He did not go to any other compartment. After leaving the lower corridor, he kept his calm posture and went straight back to his captain’s cabin.

On the way, soldiers stepped up from time to time to greet him. Some gave him a faint sense of familiarity. For others, he could not even recall their names.

There had to be clear-minded, normal humans among these soldiers. But Belazov had no way to tell who they were, and no time to contact or test the thirty humans on board one by one, not counting himself and the artificer.

He locked the cabin door from the inside, went to the safe beside his desk, and began to turn the dial. With the crisp clicks of the lock, his fingers turned even paler from the force he used.

With a soft sound, the latch opened and the safe door swung aside.

Belazov’s gaze slid past the compartment that held documents and settled on the Red Button at the bottom of the safe.

Beside the button, a small line of words was written: Protocol Twenty-Two, for use only in extreme situations.

Belazov reached out toward the button – and at almost the same moment, he heard a knock at the door: “General, are you in there? We have received orders from Frostholm that require your personal handling.”

It was his adjutant’s voice.

A trace of doubt suddenly rose in Belazov’s heart.

What if he was wrong?

What if there was nothing wrong with the ship at all, and the only problem was himself? What if he had suffered a mild corruption that caused his thoughts and memory to twist, that made him hear things and see things that were not there along the way… If that was true, then he was about to bury everyone on this ship because of his own frayed nerves.

“General, are you in there? We have received orders from Frostholm…”

The knocking grew slightly more urgent than before.

But in that knocking, Belazov suddenly woke up. He suddenly realized that those thoughts did not really match his own nature. He was not someone who would hesitate at the very last step of an action.

Someone was pouring “impurities” into his thoughts.

“That damn heretic scum!”

Belazov no longer felt even a trace of doubt. He pressed the Red Button at once.

After a very short delay, a terrible explosion swept through the entire ship. The mechanical cutter Sea Swallow was suddenly wrapped in flash and flame. Under the horrifying force of the high explosive, it was torn into pieces.

The burning wreckage of the Sea Swallow floated on the sea for a while. Driven by the currents, it drifted slowly toward the waters north of Frostholm. Then its floating finally reached its end. The red-hot wreckage began to sink faster, as if dragged down by some invisible power. Its speed grew quicker and quicker, until it vanished completely from the surface.

…

At the same time, in the city-state of Frostholm, near Cemetery No. 3, an Old Caretaker in a pitch-black coat, his back slightly bent, was slowly walking back from the city.

He had just gone to buy some daily necessities on a nearby street. It was now close to dusk, and he had to return to his “post” before the shift change.

The road leading to the cemetery was deep and quiet. Few people walked there, but even so, a resident from the nearby blocks would sometimes pass along this path.

Whenever they noticed the Old Caretaker’s figure, they would unconsciously adjust their steps and keep a bit of distance from this hunched, gloomy old man.

They did not hate this warden. They simply felt a natural fear. It was not only because the area around the cemetery was eerie and strange, but also because of the old man’s lonely and cold nature. Even in the whole cemetery district, compared with the other wardens who were more or less gloomy, the Old Caretaker of Cemetery No. 3 could be called the most frightening of them all.

He had held this post for so long that even he seemed to have taken on a bit of the air of the dead.

That had even given rise to some frightening rumors. People often said they had seen pale lights floating above the fence after nightfall, and that those lights were the warden’s soul, long separated from his body. Others said that this terrifying old man lay down in a coffin at midnight, stopped breathing with the dead, and woke again only when the Sun rose the next day.

These eerie, chilling stories wrapped themselves around the cemetery and its warden. Yet the strange, withdrawn warden seemed to never care. In fact, he almost never dealt with the nearby residents. Aside from trips like today to buy the things he needed, he spent most of his time in the small warden’s hut inside the cemetery and usually only dealt with the Church’s corpse-bearers.

He saw nothing wrong with this.

Keeping the living away from the world of the dead, so the first would not suffer harm from too much curiosity, and the second could enjoy peace after death and take their last road in quiet – that was his responsibility.

He guarded the cemetery, and he guarded the city outside the cemetery as well.

The old man raised his head and looked toward the cemetery gate not far away, then stopped walking.

Today, something was a little different.

There was a small guest.