Chapter 330

Chapter 330: .

Morris made full use of his way with words. In the calm, casual talk, he used hints and side questions to confirm many things with Galina.

During the talk, he and Duncan slowly confirmed the state of this female apprentice.

All the memories about the shipwreck Brown Scott had suffered six years ago, and everything related to her mentor’s death after that, had completely vanished from Galina’s mind.

No, it was not only the memories that had vanished, but the whole chain of understanding that went with them.

A person’s death set off a chain of reactions. It included ripples in one’s social circle, the handling of affairs after death, a long period of remembrance and emotional swings, and all the tiny changes that would have built up in this house over six years. That was not something you could fix by simply deleting and replacing a piece of memory.

Yet in Galina’s understanding, “Brown Scott died in a shipwreck six years ago” had never happened at all. No trace of the follow-up chain of events remained either. She only felt it was natural that she had lived in this house for six years, quietly waiting for her teacher to return. And now, in her eyes, her teacher had already come back and was resting in the room upstairs.

The kettle’s sharp whistle suddenly sounded, cutting off the talk in the sitting room. Galina stood up at once and walked toward the kitchen: “Sorry, I need to turn off the stove.”

While the Senkin lady was away for a moment, Duncan looked up at Morris on the sofa opposite and said: “Her cognition has been interfered with.”

“We should check the whole building,” Morris said in a low voice. “If Brown really is here, he must have left something while he was still clear-headed. He even wrote me a second letter not long ago. At that time he had clearly already noticed some of the truth.”

“…Let Galina rest for a while,” Duncan said softly.

Morris nodded. While they spoke, Galina had already come back from the kitchen. She carried a large tray with warming ginger tea and some biscuits. The lady with stone-like gray-white skin set the tray on the coffee table, looked up at the two guests and said: “Thank you for waiting. Have some ginger tea to warm yourselves.”

“Thank you,” Morris said as he pointed to the sofa beside him. “Galina, sit here first, sit properly. I need to tell you something.”

“Ah… all right, Mr. Morris.” Galina felt a little strange, but faced with her mentor’s close friend, she still sat down at once as told. “What do you want to say?”

Morris fixed his gaze on Galina’s eyes and said: “Lomonosov Inequalities.”

Galina’s eyes snapped wide open. A vast flood of knowledge, memories, and logical problems instantly covered all her thoughts. Before she could even grasp the rough outline of this “storm of information”, a strong, self-protective drowsiness was already rising in her mind.

She silently fainted. Her snoring was steady, and her sleeping posture looked peaceful.

Duncan watched this with no expression. After two seconds of silence, he asked: “How long will she sleep?”

“Depends on intelligence. Heidi slept for twelve hours that time. Galina should sleep longer,” Morris shrugged. “Folklore scholars usually are not that good at mathematics.”

For a moment Duncan did not know what to say. After a long pause he finally asked: “Why did you use this trick on your own daughter?”

“Heidi insisted that her hypnosis skills had already surpassed mine, and a father sometimes has some strange competitiveness.”

Duncan thought for a moment and felt there was no need to continue this topic. He stood up and looked at the staircase leading to the second floor.

“Now we can take a proper look. If Galina did not lie, her teacher should be in the bedroom on the second floor.”

The old stairs creaked. Bright electric lights lit up the corridor on the second floor. Morris and Duncan climbed the stairs and began to search for the folklore scholar who had “returned to the Mortal Realm”.

The layout of the second floor was not complicated. A straight corridor connected every room, and most of the doors were not locked. Duncan and Morris quickly checked most of the rooms, then stopped in front of the last door on the left side of the corridor.

It was the only locked place on the whole second floor.

Morris stepped forward and tugged the doorknob. His brows furrowed slightly. “Locked. Bolted from inside.”

“Locked from inside?” Duncan felt a faint wrongness, then remembered something. “Galina just said she brought food to her teacher’s room every day…”

“Impossible. This door has not been opened for many days – a week or more,” Morris said at once. His eyes slowly swept over the door in front of him, and faint light seemed to ripple in his gaze. “The lock also shows no sign of damage.”

“…So Galina only ‘believes’ she brings food to her teacher’s room every day, but in fact her teacher has not opened this door for many days,” Duncan said. He glanced back at the stairs leading down to the first floor. “The cognitive interference has kept going.”

Morris did not speak. He only raised his hand and gently knocked on the pale yellow door.

There was no answer from the room.

“Brown, it is me,” Morris called. “If you are inside, open the door. No matter what state you are in now, you do not need to worry. We can solve the trouble you have run into.”

There was still no answer.

Duncan quietly set his gaze on the door. He only felt that the situation… was not surprising.

In the end he gave a soft sigh. “Let me do it, Morris. We are probably still a step too late.”

Morris’s expression stiffened for a moment. He seemed to want to say something, but his lips trembled twice and he still said nothing. He only silently stepped aside.

Duncan did not use any fancy method. He just stepped forward and rammed the door. The ordinary wooden door, already not very solid, broke its lock with a loud bang and swung wide open.

A room almost completely wrapped in darkness appeared before them.

There was no light on in the room. The window facing the street also seemed to be blocked by something, so even the street lamps outside could not shine inside. Only the light spilling in from the corridor lit a small patch near the door. In the shadows beyond, they could vaguely see some dim shapes covering the ceiling and floor.

Duncan stepped into the room first. He raised his right hand, and in his palm he held a cluster of ghostly green spirit form flame. With his other hand he felt for the light switch beside the door.

When the light came on, everything in the room finally became clear.

“This is…” Morris, who followed him in, saw the scene inside and cried out softly in shock.

Patches of some gray-black, mud-like substance lay all over the room. They covered the floor, corrupted the walls, and even clung firmly to the ceiling. In some places half-melted “mud” drooped down from the filth on the ceiling and hung in midair. They looked like twisted, swollen blood vessels, or some strangely shaped stalactites.

In an instant, Duncan thought of the scene he had seen in the hold of the Obsidian back then.

These strange, horrifying “mud” patches looked almost exactly the same as the situation in the Obsidian’s lower hold.

The muscles in Morris’s face tightened.

To be honest, from the very beginning he had not believed that his “old friend” had really returned to the Mortal Realm. He knew that behind this affair there had to be some kind of runaway state supernatural manifestation, one of those manifestations of the extraordinary, maybe even tied to the Deep Sea’s curse. But even though he had faintly expected it before they opened the door, seeing this scene with his own eyes still hit him hard.

“The Deep Sea’s replicas… it seems they all end up like this,” Duncan’s voice broke Morris’s daze. “In the end we still came a step too late. It is a pity.”

Morris blinked, then shook his head hard, as if to shake out the tangled thoughts in his mind. He walked deeper into the room, carefully stepping around the clumps of “mud” on the floor, and after a while stopped by a table.

This table was also covered in mud, and the largest heap of mud was piled between the table and the bed.

“…He wrote two letters. At least at that time he still had some sanity,” Morris said softly. “He must have noticed his own Anomaly…”

“His sanity lasted at least until the moment he locked this room from inside. After that he could no longer control what happened,” Duncan said as he came to the desk. He watched the hardened mud around them with a thoughtful look. “These replicas from the Deep Sea do not all seem the same. Some have no trace of sanity at all. Some even keep their original memories and can live for a while like an ordinary person. And some… are like the captain of the Obsidian, twisted completely into a monster, yet keeping his soul from beginning to end.”

“Like some kind of unstable experimental product?”

Morris said this offhand, and just then something suddenly entered his sight.

There was a sheet of paper. It was pinned under the edge of a hardened lump of mud that faintly held the shape of an arm.

“This is…” The old scholar’s eyes went wide. He gave a soft cry and carefully pulled the paper free. “Mr. Duncan, look at this!”

Duncan moved over at once. On the dirty paper, a few words that were no longer very clear came into his view.

“To the investigator, the following are the changes that happened to my body in its final stage:”