Chapter 357

Chapter 357: replica

The content on the paper was fragmented. It seemed to hide some vague metaphors. Reading it carefully only made it feel stranger. Even someone as well-read as Morris, a Grand Scholar, had gone over those lines again and again and still found no clue.

What were the lost Elder Kings? What was the abandoned clan? Who were the people in the ashes, and what was the “protection” that kept appearing in those lines?

Duncan frowned tightly. His gaze swept over the ink that had blurred slightly after being soaked in water. Some of the words recorded there stirred faint associations in his mind, but they refused to form any clear line of thought. He only felt that… this did not seem like meaningless mad rambling. Those almost religious paragraphs seemed to be talking about something connected to this “Deep Sea era.”

Or perhaps, about something from before the Deep Sea era.

“Is this Crow’s handwriting?” Vanna suddenly asked. She looked up at Nemo standing beside her.

“It’s his,” Nemo said. He crouched down, studied it, and nodded with certainty. “He always drags out the last stroke at the end of a sentence. No one else has that habit.”

“What did he believe in?” Vanna asked again. “Aside from the Orthodox faith, did he ever come into contact with any other spiritual guidance? It doesn’t have to be heretical. Secret societies and academic retreat circles, those gray groups count too.”

“He was a devout believer in the God of Death. He had been since he was a child. Other than the Cathedral of Bartok, I’ve never seen him go to any other gathering,” Nemo said, thinking back as he spoke. “As for societies or academic retreat circles… that’s even more impossible. With his brain? A guy who had to spend three extra years in remedial classes just to graduate from a public high school in the Lower City? Even if he wanted to join those circles, they’d have to want him first!”

“…A devout Orthodox believer who never touched any spiritual guidance outside the faith in the True Gods… that makes this very interesting,” Vanna murmured. She looked at the paper in Morris’s hand and pressed a knuckle to her chin. “The style of these passages clearly carries the traces of the classical Age of City-States, or even the earlier Dark Age. And it’s the typical style of Sacred Script. That isn’t something a person who barely managed to graduate from a public high school could just imagine on his own. And Crow kept this right on him. That means he cared a great deal about what was written on it.”

Duncan did not speak. He had been thinking quietly and now suddenly reacted: “So this might be something he copied from somewhere else.”

“Copied?” Nemo froze, then he also caught on. “You mean Crow might have stumbled into some place, and this text… is ‘clues’ he copied down there?”

“Maybe even he didn’t know what these things meant. But this was the most suspicious and most important information he saw in that place,” Duncan said with a slow nod. “And unfortunately, he may have drawn his death to himself while copying it.”

“He stumbled into some place…” Vanna slowly stood up. She crossed her arms, thinking as she spoke. “Then that place must have been completely unfamiliar to Crow, and the environment might have been very strange. So strange that he couldn’t quickly figure out where he was. He could only hurry to record what he saw as clues. On the other hand, he might have been discovered and killed soon after he finished copying, so he had no time to explore further. Otherwise, he would have had a chance to note more distinctive details to describe the environment he saw.”

As she spoke, she lowered her head again to look at the drowned body, her brows knitting together.

“Where exactly did he go? And how was he sent back? A soaking wet corpse would have left some trace while being moved…”

Nemo lifted his head and looked around.

In the dry sewer corridor, there was no sign at all that a body had been dragged through.

“Maybe we should follow the route Crow usually took on patrol and go deeper. He might have left traces before he wandered into that place,” Morris said. He raised his head and looked into the depths of the corridor. “He usually walked in this direction, right?”

“Yes,” Nemo said with a nod. “This corridor leads toward the Upper City. But there’s a stretch where the lighting is unstable and sometimes gets swallowed by darkness. Short periods of darkness don’t cause much trouble, but some… unpleasant things can appear. So it needs regular patrols to find shadows that have just started to grow.”

“Then let’s go take a look. If we go soon, we might still find clues,” Duncan said with a nod. “And if something really has crawled out over there, we can deal with it at the same time.”

No one objected.

The group said a brief farewell to Crow’s body and prepared to move deeper along the sewer corridor. Before they passed the young man’s corpse, Nemo and Old Ghost both lowered their heads at the same time.

“Wait here for us. We’ll come back to get you,” Nemo said.

Old Ghost bent down and, from who-knows-where, fished out a triangular amulet. He tucked it into Crow’s chest: “Don’t go wandering off, kid.”

Duncan watched in silence as they said their goodbyes. Only after Nemo and Old Ghost were done did he turn and lead the group onward.

“When we go back, we’ll tell Captain Tyrian what happened here,” Vanna said suddenly as they walked. “That young man won’t die without anyone knowing why.”

“Thank you,” Nemo said quietly. His mood was clearly bad. A heavy sadness clung to him. “That kid… he never really did anything great in his life. But this time, Captain Tyrian and Captain Duncan will remember him. I guess that counts as some kind of honor.”

“Did he have family?” Morris broke the silence with a soft question.

“Family? He hasn’t had any for a long time. He grew up in an orphanage. When he was a teenager he left the orphanage and came to be my apprentice,” Nemo said, shaking his head. “The head of the orphanage said they picked him up off the street, in a trash bin at the corner. When they first brought him back, he was really only as long as a crow from head to toe…”

“An abandoned child,” Old Ghost muttered. There was something like anger in his voice. “When the Queen was still here, she would never have allowed such a thing. Abandoning a baby would get you thrown in jail! And now people have sunk so low they can throw a child into a trash bin… That kid was tough, though. When he first came to us from the orphanage he was so scrawny. A teenager, but skinny like a monkey. I worried all the time he’d catch a chill one winter and die of it. But he lived… he lived…”

The old man suddenly stopped, as if he had jammed mid-sentence. Then he shook his head, his mood falling: “In the end, he still didn’t live.”

The atmosphere in the group grew especially heavy. Even the usually dull Alice could feel the weight pressing down. She looked around in confusion, then hesitated and walked over to Old Ghost, as if she wanted to comfort him: “You… don’t be sad.”

Old Ghost looked up at Alice in her wig and veil and stared blankly for a moment. Then he gave a hard sniff: “Your Majesty, you have to do something about this…”

Alice stared at the old man, completely at a loss.

But her awkward confusion did not last long, because the team suddenly stopped.

The corridor ahead lay under dim, gloomy light. Two gas lamps that seemed to be malfunctioning were set into the walls. Their weak glow could barely push back the darkness ahead. Vanna raised her head and cast her gaze toward the boundary of light and shadow on the floor. Her expression slowly grew more serious.

“There’s someone lying there…”

Her voice was low.

A thin-looking figure lay unmoving by the drainage channel at the edge of the corridor. Because the air here did not circulate well, the gas lamps burned weakly. Their faint glow fell across a thick blue coat that looked very familiar.

The group walked up to the fallen body. When Duncan saw the face, he felt no surprise at all. It was Crow.

Unlike Duncan and the others, who had half expected this, Nemo and Old Ghost were only left stunned when they saw that face. There was even a trace of fear.

“Crow?!” Nemo’s voice trembled. He stared at the person on the ground, instinctively taking half a step back. “How… how can this be…”

“It’s a replica,” Duncan said calmly, cutting off Nemo’s cry. From the first glance, he had been certain that this body was a replica formed from elements. Around the “corpse,” patches of thick black goo had already started to appear. The breakdown had begun.

There seemed to be differences between replicas too. Though all of them were formed from elements, some replicas could move around the city-state for ten days or more, while others started to fall apart before they ever reached the graveyard. And this particular replica… was breaking down even faster.

From Crow’s disappearance until now, only a few hours had passed at most.

Thoughts raced through Duncan’s mind.

If Crow really had stumbled into some dangerous and eerie place—like the lair of the Annihilators—and if he had copied that suspicious Sacred Script there, then the process of copying him must also have begun in that place.

And now his replicant lay here, in this area he patrolled so often.

They were heading in the right direction.

Perhaps the source of the replicant was somewhere nearby!