Chapter 355

Chapter 355: The Disturbance Deep in the Abandoned Waterway.

As the old yet booming voice rang out, Duncan heard a series of clattering noises from the hut, as if someone had stood up in a hurry and bumped into a pile of junk. Then came approaching footsteps, and an old man appeared in the doorway. He was hunched over, with sparse white hair, a dull gray coat, and a face covered in deep wrinkles.

The man called “Old Ghost” stood inside his little administrator’s hut, bent at the waist. His somewhat cloudy eyes swept over the people outside. Duncan could not tell whether the old man had even seen them clearly before he lowered his head and muttered in a hurry: “The Queen has come to inspect… I did not even get ready… Those assistants are getting more and more unreliable, and the messengers too…”

“Old Ghost!” Nemo had to raise his voice to cut off the old man’s rambling. “The Queen is not here! The Queen is not coming back! We have guests today— They are important guests Captain Tyrian arranged. Stop muttering. They came to see you.”

As he spoke, Nemo turned his head, his face apologetic as he said to Duncan: “Sorry— As you can see, he is a bit unhinged. He often suddenly slips back into things from decades ago. But do not be fooled. The moment he deals with pipes and valves, he becomes clear-headed at once.”

“Clear-headed? I am clear-headed!” In the time it took to say that, Old Ghost’s eyes suddenly shifted, as if he had come to his senses. He looked over Duncan and the others and muttered: “Guests. Strange faces can still make it down here… Did you check their tokens and passphrases?”

“We checked. Of course we checked,” Nemo said at once, sneaking a careful glance at Duncan. “They are honored guests. Just treat it as if… as if Captain Tyrian were here in person.”

“Oh, then come in. There is not much to see here anyway,” Old Ghost grumbled as he moved aside. “Just some old junk, if you do not mind it.”

Vanna turned to look at Morris. Morris kept his eyes fixed on Old Ghost.

A moment later, Morris shook his head and spoke very softly: “Hard to judge— His mind is not very sound to begin with, and his memory keeps cutting in and out.”

Duncan heard Morris’s quiet report. His expression did not change. He simply followed the muttering old man inside and stepped into the abandoned staff rest room.

The room was not large. A single gas lamp lit it brightly. As expected, it was piled high with all sorts of things. Aside from a bed in the corner, everything in sight was sagging shelves and crates on the floor, stuffed full of mechanical parts, spare valve sets, and work tools.

Even a skilled acrobat would come out of here with serious injuries.

“So messy,” Alice muttered quietly as she looked at the chaos in the room. “I really want to tidy it up…”

“Ah, my deepest apologies!” Old Ghost, who had been moving through a pile of clutter, turned at once and bowed, bent low. “Your Majesty the Queen, I have been neglecting my duties lately. This place is a bit of a mess…”

Alice froze: “Huh?”

Duncan’s eyes also changed slightly. But just as he looked at Old Ghost, ready to say something, the old man suddenly grew hazy again. He straightened up while muttering to himself: “Strange, where did I put my kettle… How can guests come and not even get a sip of water…”

Duncan and the others looked at one another.

“You do not need to look for your kettle. Our guests only want to ask you a few things,” Nemo said at this point. “About the current state of the Second Waterway, and about yourself. They are here to investigate.”

“Investigate?” Old Ghost stopped at once and turned around, his expression suddenly grave. “General Tyrian still needs to investigate his own troops? Has there been a traitor? Is it in our sector? Or over in the central district? I knew they had been acting strange lately…”

“There is no traitor, but other infiltrators might be under threat from some kind of supernatural corruption,” Vanna stepped forward then, and almost tripped on the junk on the floor— For her height of one meter ninety, this cramped chaos was truly a challenge. “Have you been in touch with people from other sectors recently? Has anyone shown any Anomalies?”

“Anomalies? Not quite to that point. But the handler over in the central district keeps saying there are gurgling sounds in the abandoned pipes over there, as if someone is trying to bring the Second Waterway back online,” Old Ghost waved his hand. “You have seen the state of the Second Waterway. The things built in the Queen’s time are solid, but it has still been abandoned for so many years. There are many sections down there we simply cannot approach. Sometimes the underground river seeps into the cracks in the rock and brings strange noises with it. That is normal…”

The old man’s words kept drifting off topic, and Duncan had to speak to drag the conversation back: “This central district you mentioned… Is that the same area where the Boiling Gold mine is?”

“Boiling Gold? Ah, yes, Boiling Gold, all in that area— The Cathedral is there, the Queen’s palace is there, and the mine is there as well. That mine is deep, several hundred meters at least,” Old Ghost sat down on his bed. As he talked, he suddenly slapped his leg. “Ah, right. The sounds must be coming from one of the levels of the mine. The Second Waterway runs quite close to it there… I told you, the handler in that sector is just too nervous, always jumpy…”

The old man started muttering to himself again, but this time Duncan did not interrupt. He had already sunk into thought.

He recalled how he had first come to Frostholm, and the first body he had used here— A worker who had fallen to his death in the Boiling Gold mine, plunging to the lowest level of the shaft. When the search party finally brought him up, what they found was a replica made of elements.

And now Old Ghost had mentioned that the handler hidden in the central district had heard strange sounds in the pipes of the Second Waterway. It sounded as if something was surging inside them. The Second Waterway in the central district lay very close to one of the levels of the Boiling Gold mine.

Considering that both were “antiques” left over from the Queen’s era fifty years ago, Duncan even suspected that their relationship was more than just “very close”.

Those pipes might even all be connected!

He quickly noted down this clue in his mind, then asked: “From here, is there any way to reach the underground of the central district directly? How do you usually meet with that handler?”

“From here? No, that will not do. There is a passage in between that is pitch black. It was corrupted long ago. The other routes have all collapsed. You have to go from the surface, but the surface is crawling with the Rebels’ lackeys now. You must be very careful…” Old Ghost muttered, then suddenly cried out: “Queen’s Guard Corps! The Rebels are here, blow up the shaft, quickly!”

The old man shot up from his bed and stared around in panic, as if the Rebels would storm this place in the very next second. Then he suddenly stopped, and his gaze fell on Alice.

“Oh, I was mistaken. The Queen is safe and sound…”

Alice flailed in a bit of panic and waved her hands: “I… I am not the Queen…”

Duncan looked at the old man by the bed, his gaze deep. But the old man grew dazed again. After a few seconds, he stared blankly at Alice: “Young lady, who are you?”

“Old Ghost, you really are senile now— This is not just the fumes from back then, even your eyes have gone bad!” Nemo’s voice suddenly cut through the eerie moment. Nemo nodded to Duncan with an apologetic look. “Sorry. Old Ghost is usually a bit scatterbrained, but he seems worse than usual today. He has not dealt with outsiders for a long time. Seeing you got him excited and he mixed up all those old memories.”

“…It is fine,” Duncan said calmly, drawing his gaze back from the old man.

He did not care much whether the old man had truly seen a trace of Frostholm’s Queen in the disguised Alice. Was it a brief moment of clarity in a muddled mind? Had he seen through the disguise? Or was it just tangled memories? None of that mattered.

If this half-mad old man really saw a faint shadow of Frostholm’s Queen in Alice, and felt a moment of peace in his heart because of it, that would be a good thing.

Just then, Nemo seemed to remember something. He frowned: “Strange. Why has Crow still not come back?”

“Crow? He went to check the northern corridor,” Old Ghost waved. “That fellow is a slow one. He always dawdles outside for half the day before he comes back.”

But Nemo’s furrowed brow did not ease at all: “…No. Even if he drags his feet, he should be back by now. The lights over there break down all the time. His consecrated lantern cannot last that long… Old Ghost, when did he leave?”

“Two or three hours?” Old Ghost thought about it and seemed to grow serious as well. “Now that you say it, it really has been quite a while.”

“I have a bad feeling. Crow has been deep in the waterway for too long,” Nemo’s tone finally grew heavy as he raised his head to look at Duncan and the others. “I have to go find him.”