Chapter 369

Chapter 369: The Gatekeeper Pays a Visit

Duncan sat on the sofa in the living room, relaxed, reading the morning newspaper he had bought on the street. From time to time he turned his head to glance at Shirley, who was hunched over the coffee table, frowning as she wrote, and at Dog, who lay beside her, fully absorbed in a copy of *Abridged Modern History of the City-States*. The sight filled him with a quiet sense of peace.

In this strange and eerie world, he had finally found a bit of familiar rhythm again.

On the other hand, bringing Dog, Shirley, and Nina over also fulfilled an idea he had been turning over in his mind for a long time—Captain Duncan’s little classroom had finally reopened.

He turned his head to the other side of the coffee table. Nina had pulled over a small stool and sat there, carefully working on her winter break homework. Morris sat beside her, supervising, occasionally correcting some small mistakes for his student.

“You are a responsible teacher,” Duncan said to Morris. “Nina is lucky.”

“She is a hardworking child. I don’t want to delay her life,” Morris smiled. Then he glanced at the homework spread in front of Shirley, and his expression grew a little complicated. “But I did not expect you to be so good at… teaching others.”

Duncan raised an eyebrow: “Oh?”

“The study plan you set for Shirley, Alice, and Dog is very reasonable, even… somewhat professional,” Morris said, sounding a bit hesitant. “I also saw the test papers you prepared for them earlier. They were quite professional as well. That was a bit… beyond what I expected.”

The old mister chose his words very carefully. He really did care about this. When he first heard that Duncan was enthusiastically going to teach the three illiterates on the ship how to read, the picture in his mind was not vocabulary cards, vocabulary books, and multiplication tables. The first image that surfaced went straight toward Eldritch God retainers gathering on a ritual field to touch forbidden knowledge. Yet what he actually saw was the fearsome Captain Duncan pulling out a stack of literacy cards…

How to put it… He had more or less grown used to Captain Duncan’s mild, friendly manner in private now. But whenever he thought about a being from the Subspace Shadows seriously giving people lessons—literacy lessons, at that—that awkward feeling still surged up uncontrollably.

Duncan of course understood what the old scholar meant, but he had no way to explain. He only smiled and waved a hand: “Perhaps I once had a dream of being a teacher.”

Morris did not know what to say for a moment. Duncan leaned over to glance at Shirley’s maddening handwriting and could not help sighing: “It is a shame the progress of these three students is so uneven. It is really a headache.”

Morris thought for a bit and nodded: “Indeed. I feel Dog could almost camp out in some library and teach himself all the way to graduation now, yet Shirley is still wrestling with common vocabulary. Alice… Alice, she…”

Duncan sighed again: “Ah, Alice works very hard, but she is Alice.”

The learning progress of the three illiterates on the ship was nothing like what he had imagined at first. He had thought that, since she had a sharper mind, Shirley’s pace would be faster, yet she was still half illiterate. Her unwavering determination to slack off and her despairing attitude toward study were the main reasons. Alice, on the other hand, worked harder than anyone, but the doll miss’s head simply did not seem suited for reading and writing. In the end, the most advanced of the three illiterates turned out to be a dog. With astonishing diligence and understanding, Dog could not only read literary works on his own now, he could even solve three-variable quadratic equations…

There were countless Abyssal Hounds chasing after knowledge—now it seemed only Dog had actually caught up.

To be fair, this was the greatest stain on Duncan—or rather Zhou Ming’s—entire teaching career.

Just as he was thinking this, Alice, who had gone out to buy groceries, finally came back—almost twenty minutes later than expected.

“I’m back!”

The doll miss opened the door and stepped inside. As she put down the things in her hands, she craned her neck toward the living room and called out. With one glance she saw the study ace, the study slacker, and the study dog doing homework by the coffee table, and her face lit up with delight: “Nina! Shirley! Dog! You’re here?”

“We came this morning. I’ve already been doing this damn… already been making up homework for half the day…” Shirley lifted her head, eyes brimming. “The captain said I have to copy everything from page sixteen in the vocabulary book onward all over again…”

“Three times,” Duncan said calmly from the side. “Don’t quietly trim two-thirds off your own assignment.”

Then he ignored Shirley’s reaction and looked up at Alice: “Why are you only back now? Did you run into trouble?”

“Ah, no, no!” Alice waved both hands quickly. “There was just some commotion… I didn’t go watch the commotion! Something happened, and I investigated it…”

This doll truly could not lie and was not good at making excuses. In just a few sentences she exposed the fact that she had wasted time watching the commotion on her way home.

“Investigated?” Duncan looked at Alice with mild surprise. He did not intend to pursue the matter of her “watching the commotion”, even though he had indeed warned her not to wander around on the way. That was only a small thing. What he cared more about was… that the usually scatterbrained Alice had just said the word “investigated” with such a serious expression.

Even if it was just an excuse she had made up on the spot, he still cared a great deal about what this doll had gone to investigate.

“On that street nearby, there was a household where they said someone had died. People from the Church had all gone over,” Alice immediately began telling Duncan what she had seen on the way. “A woman said she killed her husband, and the onlookers were saying the man of the house had gone out before that or something… Ah, right, right, I also saw a woman whose clothes looked a lot like yours! She was wrapped in bandages too…”

Duncan listened, a bit dazed, to the doll’s rambling, point-less story and barely managed to figure out what had happened. Then he noticed the last part, about the “bandaged woman”. He frowned slightly and was just about to ask for details when he saw Vanna, who had been feeding the pigeons at the dining table, suddenly stand up.

“Stranger approaching,” Vanna said quickly. “Clergy.”

Duncan immediately waved his hand, signaling Alice to be quiet and put her veil back on. Dog, who had been squatting by the sofa, slipped back into the Shadows in the blink of an eye. Ai flapped its wings and hid on a nearby cabinet. Morris rose from the sofa and went to the door.

“Don’t be nervous. It is only a guest,” Duncan remained quite calm. He waved at the somewhat tense Vanna and Morris, then walked to the door and pulled it open.

A young woman in a long black coat, bandages wrapped around her body, wearing a black round hat and holding a Gatekeeper’s cane, stood outside. Her hand was still raised, ready to knock.

She seemed frozen in place.

Duncan looked the young lady up and down, then glanced down at himself.

“Ah, matching outfits,” he said casually.

“That’s her, that’s her,” Alice, standing slightly behind Duncan, saw the visitor clearly now and eagerly leaned over. “The black-clothed woman I told you about, the one I saw on the way back from buying groceries…”

Alice’s voice jolted Agatha out of her daze. The muscles on her face twitched slightly. It took her quite an effort to drag her gaze away from the tall, broad figure before her and look toward the source of the sound.

The blonde woman with no breath or heartbeat, whom she had met not long ago, now stood inside the house, watching with curious, delighted eyes.

She really was here.

Agatha took several deep breaths, trying to calm her racing heart. The faint ringing in her head slowly faded. The darkness and double vision that came from suddenly staring into the Truth finally retreated from before her eyes. At last she let out a quiet breath. In her chaotic mind, she remembered why she had come.

A slightly stiff smile appeared on her face: “I… did not mean to disturb you. I only came to check on the situation. You…”

“Come in,” Duncan said calmly, nodding and stepping aside to open a path. “It is quite cold. Let’s not talk at the door.”

Agatha froze for a moment, not reacting at first.

Seeing this, Vanna, who had been silent before, could not help frowning. She stepped forward and looked at the newcomer: “You rushed over here knowing exactly what this place is. Don’t tell me you never thought about what would happen once the door opened?”

“Have some sympathy,” Morris said quickly at her side. “Anyone’s mind would be a mess the first time they met the captain. The higher your Spirit Sight, the worse it is. This young lady is clearly all tangled up.”

When Vanna heard this, she immediately recalled her own first day aboard the Vanished and decided the old mister was right.

While Vanna and Morris were talking, Agatha finally came back to herself. Her mind was still somewhat chaotic, but reason had taken control again. Thanks to Duncan’s deliberate restraint, her sanity had not been too badly shaken. As soon as she recovered, she hurriedly nodded: “Sorry, I was a bit distracted.”

Then she looked at the path Duncan had opened. After a brief hesitation, she finally stepped forward.

She knew what this place was.

She knew that the towering figure before her was, in essence, an indescribable being who had descended into the city-state, with a rank very likely comparable to the Elder Gods.

She knew that with this step, she was entering a “descent site”.

But from the moment the door had opened, there had been no room left for regret.

Behind Duncan, Morris watched the tense young lady step inside. He tilted his head slightly toward Vanna and whispered: “She’s a bit better than you were.”

Vanna muttered softly: “That wasn’t my fault. The captain’s first Dreamwalking was too terrifying.”

Morris nodded: “That’s true…”

Vanna added: “But the second time, I was much calmer.”

Listening to the two of them muttering behind him, Duncan finally could not help turning his head: “You weren’t much better the second time either. Quiet down. We have a guest.”