Chapter 336

Chapter 336: Doll and spirit coffin

From the very beginning, the world in Alice’s eyes had seemed completely different from that of an ordinary person. Yet no one had noticed this until today.

Not even Alice herself had realized it.

Duncan had heard from Vanna about the battle in the alley and about how Alice had acted in that fight. From the moment she sensed the hidden enemy through the “floating lines” to the moment she turned a fleeing Annihilator into a shattered porcelain doll, the whole thing had astonished Duncan.

Now all eyes were on Miss Doll, who had been confused from beginning to end.

“…So you really can’t see the lines…” Alice finally reacted. She scratched her head, looking innocent. “I thought this was common sense. After all, that stuff is floating above everyone’s heads and limbs…”

Duncan stared into Alice’s eyes, his expression especially serious: “Let me confirm something. Everyone has these ‘lines’, right?”

“Yeah, everyone does, except you, Captain,” Alice answered at once.

Duncan thought for a moment, then asked: “…Is it just my real body that doesn’t have them, or this body I’m using now as well?”

“You don’t have them in this body either,” Alice answered honestly, then added: “And the body you had in Pland didn’t have them either…”

Duncan nodded lightly. His thoughts raced, one guess after another rising and falling in his mind.

In Alice’s eyes, lines floated on everyone in the world, yet not on him, and not even on the bodies he occupied. So these “lines” were not attached to flesh and blood. They must have symbolized something more essential. A soul? Or a personality?

When she was close enough, she could easily “grab” the lines on other people and use them to bind or attack her enemies. What was this ability? Was it something she had always possessed as Anomaly 099 but had never shown, or was it a mutation that appeared after she became one of the Vanished?

Duncan kept thinking, his gaze never leaving Alice’s face. Even this slow-witted Doll finally felt awkward. Alice subconsciously twisted her neck and said: “Captain… you keep staring at me… I’m getting really nervous.”

“Oh, sorry.” Duncan came back to himself and blinked, easing the pressure in his gaze. Then he turned thoughtfully toward Vanna: “As far as I know, Alice’s official designation has been changed to Anomaly 099-Doll, right?”

“Yes. Her original name was Doll spirit coffin.” Vanna nodded at once. She had already guessed what Duncan meant. “You mean Alice’s power is also related to this change?”

“Maybe. From the start, spirit coffin and Doll have represented different powers. The former is a symbol of death, so it has that simple, brutal decapitation ability, while the latter is the power to control humanoid husks. That fits the idea of a ‘Doll’,” Duncan said slowly. “Before, Alice was the ‘contents’ of the spirit coffin, so the combined form of Anomaly 099 showed only the traits of the spirit coffin. But now the Doll has become the main part of Anomaly 099, so her original ability has been released.”

“spirit coffin and Doll each have different powers…” Morris, who had been silent at the side, muttered. “That is a very likely guess.”

Duncan felt a bit emotional inside.

He had always thought that the great power of Anomaly 099 had vanished. After Alice’s wooden box underwent the transformation, she had only been a somewhat eerie but merely animated and thinking cursed doll, weak, timid, and foolish to an extreme. He had never expected her to show such a strange ability today. He really did not know how to put it.

She really was worthy of a number within the first hundred, even if by the standards of the Vanished she was still very weak.

Alice clearly did not think that much. As Duncan and the others talked, her gaze kept shifting back and forth, looking at this person and that. It took her quite a while to barely understand part of what was going on. Then her face grew a little uneasy, and she carefully looked over: “…Captain, did I do something bad?”

“No, it was a good thing.” Duncan shook his head at once. “You were very brave, and you protected yourself well. cultists are never innocent.”

“Then…” Alice thought for a moment and lifted her hand, gesturing as she spoke. “Then is my ability a bad thing?”

Duncan looked quietly at the Doll. After a long moment, a faint smile suddenly appeared on his face: “It’s a good thing.”

Alice still did not quite understand.

“You can control it, right?” Duncan asked.

“Sure.” Alice waved her hand. “It’s very easy.”

“Then it’s a good thing,” Duncan said with a smile. “Having power is never bad. Losing control is the problem. Now you can help me even more, Alice.”

Miss Doll finally smiled. She swayed from side to side with extra joy: “That’s great. Everyone suddenly looked so serious, I thought things were really bad…”

Duncan simply reached out and gently patted Alice’s hair.

She was swaying a bit too much; her head was almost about to fall off.

At the same time, his thoughts did not calm down.

Even though he now knew about Alice’s ability and had roughly guessed that Doll and spirit coffin each carried their own symbolism, that did not mean all the mysteries were solved. On the contrary, it only made him more aware that the Doll in front of him still hid many secrets.

He had spent quite some time with Alice. Because of those days together, he had grown used to this Doll making a fuss on the ship and to the way she ran back and forth in front of him all day while still seeming harmless. He had almost forgotten that, before becoming the cook among the Vanished, this Doll had first been Anomaly 099, a strange thing that rose from the cold Deep Sea after the death of the Frostholm queen.

In a sense, she and those eerie, twisted replicas actually shared the same origin.

But she was completely different from every other replica that had appeared so far. There was no way there was no reason behind that.

For some reason, he suddenly thought of something an Annihilator had said after the explosion of the Sea Swallow:

“If not for that queen…”

Duncan shook his head and pushed his tangled thoughts down for now. He looked up at Vanna.

“What happened tonight proves one thing. The replicas in the city really were the work of those Annihilators. And those cultists are not only acting in the shadows, they are also secretly watching the replicas they released into the city. That kind of observation looks a lot like they are collecting data.”

“From my experience, this is preparation for a bigger move. The replicas in the city are only the beginning, and the corruption on Dagger Island is probably another, larger testing ground.” Vanna nodded. “They also tried to transport the corruption from Dagger Island to Frostholm proper. Even though we stopped that operation, it already shows their plan has reached a very critical stage.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll step in, but first I need to know which gutter they’re hiding in,” Duncan said casually. “Killing a few cultists or priests, or even wiping out a few gathering places, is meaningless. The experience in Pland proved that.”

As he spoke, he raised his eyes. Through the gaps in his bandages, his gaze passed through the dirty window beside him and landed on the rows of spires and eaves of Frostholm.

“…Where are you hiding?”

The wind grew stronger. The second snowfall began. Snowflakes drifted down through the veil of night, and the distant streets turned hazy, as if they had sunk into fog.

The snow fell almost all night. Only when the Sun rose and the afterglow of the World’s Wound faded in the sunlight, when golden-red light spread along the streets into the city, did the falling snow slowly come to an end.

The cemetery’s heavy, solemn iron gate creaked open. The Old Caretaker, wrapped in a thick coat, hooked the latch that held the gate in place onto the fence and glanced toward the street leading to the city.

Everything in sight was covered in deep snow. The distant streets had lost their shapes and edges under the thick white blanket, turning into a featureless expanse.

Steam pipes above the blocks spewed white mist. Heat from the steam cores was being sent to key nodes to melt the ice and snow on network hubs and power stations. Large snowplows rolled out too. These hulking machines, belching thick white smoke and roaring in a low rumble, drove along the streets to clear the main traffic routes.

Since the Visitor had left, the cemetery had returned to its quiet. No more anomalies disturbed the dead. But neither the cemetery’s Warden nor the Guardians sent by the Church had relaxed after that.

In the second half of the night, an express dispatch had been sent to the Warden’s hut through the high-pressure steam conduits. The express dispatch came from City Hall. Its content was strange: it ordered all supernatural defenders in the city to raise their alert level, but did not say what they were supposed to watch out for.

Not long after that, Agatha seemed to have received some information as well. She sent a squad to Hearth Street, and those Guardians still had not returned.

The wind and snow in the second half of the night had been fierce. The howling wind and swirling snowflakes had felt like a prophetic omen of something.

The Old Caretaker pulled his coat tighter.

“This damned weather…”