Chapter 41

Chapter 41: Inside the Antique Shop

The inside of the antique shop was just as Duncan had guessed – messy, worn-down, and steeped in the feel of failing business. Just from the dust piled up around the display windows, a visitor could imagine how badly the shop’s owner had let his life fall apart.

He first saw the display tables along the walls. Their low, sturdy tops held large vases, statues, and some totem-like things of unclear meaning. Behind the tables, the walls were divided into cubbyholes for smaller “goods”. The counter stood straight across from the door, a long bar-like structure. The shelves behind the counter were dusty as well, filled with dark-toned picture frames and small ornaments.

Behind the counter he could also see a staircase leading up to the second floor. It lay in dimness, its structure hard to make out for now.

There was a small door under the stairs. In his “memories”, that door should lead to a storeroom at the back of the shop – half of which was piled high with junk.

It was hard to imagine that the cultist he now possessed had actually lived off this shop that looked like no one would ever visit, and even had spare money to make offerings to the Sun God’s priests.

Duncan walked toward the counter at the back. The old wooden floor creaked under his feet. As he passed the stairs, he noticed the lamp fixed to the wall.

It was an electric lamp.

Duncan’s brow furrowed at once.

The lamp’s style was unfamiliar. The iron frame and dull lampshade both had an exotic look. But the tungsten filament bulb inside was clear at a glance – the light source was electric.

So in this world, electricity was already this widespread? Even ordinary commoners in the Lower City used electric lights in their homes?

Then why had the light sources in the sewers earlier been gas lamps, oil lamps, and torches? Why were the streetlights outside also gas lamps?

A huge doubt rose in him. It clearly went against common sense, especially in a place like the sewers. Compared to clean, safe electric lights, gas lamps that used flammable gas and open flame had obvious disadvantages!

He had thought before that technical limits forced the city’s administrators to use gas lamps down there for light. But now it seemed that, at least in the city-state of Pland, technology had already developed to the point where electricity had entered ordinary homes!

A huge sense of wrongness filled Duncan’s heart. He tried to search his memory fragments for matching knowledge, but all he got were answers like “this is common sense” and “the city is planned that way”.

It seemed that either this kind of knowledge was simply not public, so the cultist he possessed knew nothing about it, or it was so basic that it left no deep impression in the cultist’s mind at all, and so the memory blurred quickly after death, leaving only a vague feeling of “of course it’s like this”.

With this unsolved confusion in his heart, Duncan reached out and turned on the electric lamp. With a soft click of the switch, bright light immediately lit the area around the stairs and the counter.

There was another switch on the wall opposite, used to control the lights in the rest of the first floor, but Duncan did not plan to touch it yet.

It was late at night now. One small light in a closed antique shop could still be explained as “the shopkeeper getting up and moving around”. But if every lamp suddenly blazed on, it could draw unwanted attention.

By the limited light near the stairs, Duncan first glanced over the goods closest to him. The first thing that caught his eye was a wooden, totem-like object less than half a meter tall. Red and blue paint formed a strange mask-like pattern on the wood. Beside it stood what seemed to be a ceramic antique vase. In front of them lay price tags marked with absurd sums.

Original price: four hundred and twenty thousand. Discounted price: three hundred and sixty.

It fairly radiated a kind of self-mocking despair.

Duncan quickly looked away and swept his gaze over the rest of the shop.

If there was a single genuine piece in here, he would ram the Vanished straight into Pland’s city walls.

Nothing could have been more fake. He did not even need a real collector to appraise them; anyone with a normal mind would never believe a true antique was being sold in an antique shop down in the Lower City. Would anyone who really dealt in antiques open a market in this kind of slum quarter? The oldest thing in the whole shop was probably the sign over the door…

But Duncan was not surprised that this kind of shop existed. The shopkeeper knew he was selling fakes. The people who came here did not really expect to put a thousand-year-old statue in their homes either. Everyone knew the score. Commoners in the Lower City also needed some way to satisfy their spiritual needs. The “antique shop” sign over the door was not hung for others – it was hung so the buyers could show it to themselves.

After all, under the overpasses back on Earth there had been people selling “jade” too – bracelets going for ninety-eight a piece, proudly called old-mine icy jade. Take one home and bump it on a doorframe by accident, and you would chip glass all over the floor. Did the buyers and sellers really not know what was going on?

Duncan had no interest in the shopkeeper’s miserable past life. He cared about only one thing: this place could serve as the first “foothold” on land for the captain of the Vanished.

A forward base for learning about the world on land and about modern civilized society.

He had already made up his mind. As long as Spirit Realm walking allowed it, he would keep this body going as long as possible and use this “antique shop” as cover for his movements in Pland. And if AI’s training went well later – if AI could truly transport physical objects in a stable, controlled way between the Vanished and Pland – then this antique shop would also become a secret warehouse for transferring supplies.

Duncan went behind the counter and sat down on a chair, carefully sorting through the fragments of memory in his mind and picking out every point that might pose a risk.

The original owner of this body had been a believer of the Sun God, but in the whole Church system he was only a lowest-level member. Because the city-state’s authority had kept cracking down on cult activity, the space for Sun God believers in Pland had been squeezed to the limit. Their members were extremely cautious in how they contacted each other. They always wore full hoods and masks to any gathering, and many low-level members had contact with the Church’s upper ranks only through one or at most two specific “handlers”. For the Duncan of today, this was without doubt a good thing –

It meant that even among the cultists, only that one person knew “his” identity and contact methods in the Mortal Realm. Once that person was gone, no one else would know his unspeakable heretic identity.

He could then walk right in front of the city-state’s administrators as an upstanding, clean citizen.

And the even better news was that, after carefully combing through his memories, Duncan confirmed that this biggest hidden danger had already vanished.

Because “his” handler had been one of the three black-robed cultists he saw when he first woke up…

Those three unlucky fools had already been “taken care of by the pigeon”.

He relaxed a little inside and shifted into a more comfortable position on the chair.

With the greatest risk gone, if there was still anything to worry about, it was the other Sun God believers who had taken part in the sacrificial ritual in the Underground Assembly Hall earlier, and, behind those believers, the larger and more secretive, dangerous Sun God Church.

If his memories were right, four years ago the city-state of Pland had carried out a harsh strike against the Sun God Church that lurked in the city. Since then, that heretic faith had never recovered in the city-state. Forget holding rituals; on normal days, they were already thankful if they could hide themselves well enough not to be dragged out by the Church Guardians.

But now, these extremely low-key cultists had suddenly done something very high-profile.

The purpose of a sacrificial ritual was to please a God, and also to gather power or strengthen the God’s influence on the Mortal Realm. The cultists in the hall at the time – even that priestly “Envoy” who led the ritual – had all been only rank-and-file members of the Sun God Church. Would rank-and-file members like that organize such a big scheme all on their own?

Duncan’s memory fragments were not many, and a low-level cultist would never have touched the Church’s core secrets. But even just reasoning from the information he had, he could guess that those cultists who had suddenly stirred things up must have been acting under orders from higher up.

That heretic sect that worshipped the “true Sun God”… they wanted to do something big in Pland. The sacrificial ritual that he had accidentally ruined was probably only the smallest splash before the start of that great event.

Duncan did not feel much for this “city-state of Pland”. But if he wanted to use it as his starting point, then he had to think about how a bunch of madmen like those “Sun God cultists” running wild in the city-state might affect him.