Chapter 386

Chapter 386: Return to the Mortal Realm?

The White Oak stopped on the sea. The Black Oak, shrouded in thick fog like a shadow, stopped with her. In the hazy outline of that second ship, it felt as if a hidden invitation was waiting.

Lawrence looked at the ship and hesitated.

First Mate Gus’s voice came from the side and pulled Lawrence out of his thoughts. He asked: “Should we… send someone over to take a look?”

Lawrence turned his head and looked at the First Mate who had followed him through storms for twenty or thirty years. He asked: “…You recognized her too, didn’t you?”

“…The last time we saw her was also near Frostholm,” the First Mate said. He stared at the sea not far away, his tone complicated. Like Lawrence, he was still wrapped in burning green flames, his body faint and unreal like a Ghost. “All these years, we old subordinates all knew about your situation, but none of us dared to bring this up…”

Lawrence was silent for a moment, then spoke softly: “Do you remember, not long ago, when you saw a figure standing on the deck talking with me?”

The First Mate froze for a second, then reacted at once: “That was…”

“It was Martha—the ‘Martha’ that only I could see all these years,” Lawrence said in a low voice. His words made the First Mate’s eyes widen bit by bit. “I have seen her on the ship more than once lately. I even heard her voice while we were exploring that ‘Dagger Island’… I always thought it was because this eerie sea was amplifying the hallucinations in my mind, but it seems things are not that simple.”

The First Mate slowly turned his head and looked at the Black Oak, which stayed silent and dead under the fog. After a long time he broke the silence: “This is not a hallucination. She is right here.”

Lawrence pressed his lips together and seemed to sink into thought. A few seconds later he suddenly said: “Send a signal. See how she reacts.”

The First Mate nodded at once: “Yes, Captain.”

A moment later, a set of lights along the White Oak’s rail lit up.

The crew members still in Ghost form turned the shutters in front of the searchlights and sent a string of regular flashes toward the black ghost ship that lay so close by.

Lawrence stood on the bridge and stared hard in the direction of the black ghost ship. He waited for the ship to give some kind of response, yet at the same time he almost feared seeing any response at all.

“Martha… are you there…”

The tension made him grab the handrail beside him without thinking. He muttered under his breath as if talking to himself.

The next second, a wavering point of light appeared on the Black Oak’s deck in the thick black fog. It shone for a few seconds, went out, then lit up again, repeating three times.

“…She answered,” the First Mate said. He turned his head and looked at his captain with a complicated expression. “You can wait here first. I will send a few sailors over to take a look.”

“No, I will go myself,” Lawrence said, waving his hand. His face was growing calm; he had clearly made up his mind. “If this really is some phenomenon caused by my mind slipping into a runaway state, then sending other sailors blindly onto that ship will surely be very dangerous… This is something I have to face, and only I can deal with it myself.”

The First Mate clearly still wanted to say more, but in front of a captain who had already decided, he could only swallow his words in the end. He said: “I understand.”

Lawrence nodded lightly: “Then help me get ready. A consecrated lantern, ropes, weapons, ammunition, and also…”

He stopped suddenly and looked toward the helm not far away.

A shriveled mummified corpse in an Old Era seafarer’s coat was there, inching its way to the side with great care. It used the shadows of the helm as cover and tried hard not to draw anyone’s attention. By now it had almost reached the noose hanging beside it.

Lawrence thought for a moment: “I will take it with me. I can’t leave an Anomaly that has already entered a runaway state on the White Oak, and its condition is far too strange.”

Anomaly 077 stopped at once.

…

At the same time, inside the city of Frostholm, at the sewage treatment plant near Cemetery No. 4, the black-clad Guards still watched every intersection with care. Two Warriors stood guard over the unlucky administrator. The man sat limp beside a pipe near the settling pool. His face was pale and his body still shook a little, but he still tried hard to answer every question the Guardians asked.

“I don’t know, I really don’t know… How was I supposed to tell…”

The only ordinary person left on site, the only living human in the whole treatment plant, was the balding middle-aged administrator. He kept wiping the cold sweat from his forehead. Fear and nerves blended on his face. “Everything here was always fine. I have known those people for more than just a day. They never looked strange in any way…”

“Calm down. You are just an ordinary person. It is normal to be fooled by supernatural powers,” said the black-clad Guard in charge of the questioning. The Guard had to comfort the administrator whose courage had been shattered and kept looking up now and then at the open space beside the settling pool. “The Gatekeeper will deal with those freaks—Lady Agatha will be back very soon.”

The administrator looked up at that open space on reflex. At once, the terrible scene from earlier seemed to invade his mind again. The three “church priests” had suddenly turned into strange faces. Horrible Abyssal demons had stepped out of thin air. More than a dozen treatment-plant workers had turned into twisted human-shaped monsters and had thrown themselves into a furious fight with the black-clad Guards…

The unlucky administrator shuddered all over and squeezed his eyes shut. But the darkness behind his eyelids only brought new fear, so he opened them again, his face still full of lingering dread.

The black-clad Guard beside him noticed all this and could only give him a look of pity.

He had lived in this sewage plant, which had already become a nest of freaks, for so long without knowing anything. Around him had been nothing but hidden, vicious cultists and replica freaks that elementses had already used to replace the real workers. When the truth was suddenly laid bare, the fact that he had not gone mad on the spot already spoke of a very strong mind.

Those workers who had turned into replicas were most likely replaced one by one. Now this administrator was clearly the last one left. If the Guardians had not suddenly broken into this place, his fate would likely have been to be replaced as the next “replica” as well. He could clearly imagine that himself, and that kind of after-the-fact fear was hard to put into words.

After this incident ended, this administrator would probably never be able to come back to work at the sewage plant. Forget work; he would likely need long-term therapy before he could return to a normal life. But that was not something the Guardians had to think about.

Right now the Guardians were more worried about their superior. There was no doubt about Gatekeeper Agatha’s strength. Three ordinary Oblivion priests plus a dozen replica freaks that were only good as cannon fodder could not possibly be a match for that Lady. But even so… she still had not returned.

After a while, even the administrator, who was still in a state of fear and panic, noticed how tense the air on site had become. He looked up at the black-clad Guards who stayed on alert all around and, after hesitating for a moment, could not help asking: “Excuse me… is everything alright with the Gatekeeper?”

“Lady Agatha is in the Spirit Realm. She was worried that a battle between supernatural beings would hurt you, an ordinary person, and damage the sewage equipment here,” a female black-clad Guard said in a low voice. Her steady voice carried a calming strength. “Don’t worry. No heretic can defeat the Gatekeeper of Bartok in the Spirit Realm. She is probably just still following the clues, so her return is delayed.”

The administrator nodded quickly: “O-okay…”

The very next second, a cold wind suddenly swept across the plant. The black-clad Guards serving as Wardens at the intersections all turned at the same time to look at the open space near the settling pool.

The female Guardian who had just spoken let out a breath of relief at once and smiled a little: “Ah, it seems Lady Agatha has already taken care of the trouble.”

As soon as the Guardian finished speaking, one phantom after another suddenly appeared over the open ground by the settling pool. It was as if another space was rebuilding its link with the Mortal Realm. Hazy shadows showed up in the air one after another. In just a few breaths, those shadows quickly turned solid and dropped onto the filthy ground.

They were the bodies of more than a dozen replica freaks that had turned into human-shaped mud, and the cold, broken corpses of three Annihilators.

After they hit the ground, the bodies of the replica freaks quickly “melted” into dried mud that would never writhe again. The bodies of the Annihilators began to burn the instant they returned to the Mortal Realm. In a few seconds, black flames turned them into piles of char. The Abyssal demons that had made a symbiotic pact with them did not even have time to regain solid form before they faded away in the air.

The administrator of the sewage plant stared wide-eyed at this scene that went far beyond the Mortal Realm. For a moment he even forgot the fear in his heart. Then he saw a gray-white whirlwind appear in the middle of the open ground. Smoke and thick mist seemed to churn inside it. In the blink of an eye, a figure in a black coat stepped out, condensing out of the Ashen Wind with a Gatekeeper’s cane in hand.

Agatha, who was wrapped in bandages, raised her head. She looked at the familiar Mortal Realm around her and at her subordinates, who all seemed a little tense.

“The problem is solved.” She gave the subordinates a slight nod. Her low, magnetic voice was as calm and reassuring as ever.