Chapter 42

Chapter 42: What He Saw in the Book

The city was under curfew, so it was not a good time to go out exploring. Duncan stayed in the antique shop the whole night. The excitement of finally setting foot on land kept him going, and he tirelessly searched through the entire building.

The original master of this body really had been a cultist, but at the same time he was also an ordinary person who needed a normal life. He needed the conveniences of modern civilization to survive, needed to talk to people, and needed all kinds of everyday goods.

He needed to deal with the entire city.

And all of that would leave a lot of clues. Even with his memories blurred and broken, Duncan could still roughly work out how people lived in the city-state of Pland, and what the era’s technology and living conditions were like.

Behind a secret compartment in the counter on the first floor, he found a small stash of cash: a handful of loose coins and several blue and green notes of different values. This was the legal currency used in most city-states, certified and issued jointly by their governors and the Boundless Sea Chamber of Commerce. The main unit was called the “Sola”, with the “Peso” as a subsidiary coin worth one-tenth of a Sola. The cash Duncan found added up to just over two hundred Sola, and according to the information in his memories, that was about enough to keep a family of three in the Lower City alive for a month.

So it seemed that even though business in the shop had been poor, and even though most of his property had been donated to the Church, the original master of this body still managed to maintain a basic standard of living—proof that this antique shop still had a steady trickle of customers.

The first floor of the shop had only two parts. About two-thirds of the space was the storefront in front of the stairs. The remaining third was a “warehouse” behind a small door under the stairs, and at the back of that warehouse there was another door—the building’s rear entrance, which was probably also used for bringing in goods.

The layout on the second floor was a bit more complicated. Besides a washroom, there were two rooms, one large and one small, and a narrow shaft shared with the neighboring building that held pipes and ducts. The big and small rooms sat on either side of the stair landing, and they were both surprisingly clean.

There was also a tiny kitchen on the second floor, but judging from the layer of dust on everything, it probably had not been used for at least half a month.

After checking everything, Duncan went back to the main bedroom on the second floor. He looked around the room, which was even smaller than his old studio apartment, and his gaze fell on the small cabinet beside the bed.

There was a framed picture there, and inside it… was a black-and-white photograph.

The photo showed a family of three: a plainly dressed young man and woman with a little girl who looked only four or five years old. They stood in front of an obviously painted garden backdrop, faint smiles on their faces as they looked toward the camera.

Duncan walked up to the frame, picked it up, and studied it carefully, trying again and again to match it with the vague, scattered fragments in his memory.

The original master of this body… was not in the photograph.

The people in the picture seemed to be this body’s relatives… very close ones.

When he fixed his gaze on the young couple, Duncan seemed to feel a faint sense of longing rising up from the depths of his borrowed memories.

But everything else about the photograph was blurry and indistinct. It was as if all the deeper memories about them had vanished from this world with the original master of this body’s last breath.

He set the photo down and wondered what kind of expense a black-and-white portrait like this would be for a commoner in the Lower City. He also wondered how far photography had developed in this world, and what principles the equipment used.

At the same time, his gaze drifted to the neatly made bed, and a faint doubt rose in his heart.

Would a cultist who had completely fallen into the faith of the Sun really spend so much time keeping his room this clean?

The storefront downstairs was clearly neglected, so how was the bed in this bedroom kept so immaculate?

He walked out the door and crossed to the smaller room opposite the stairs. Inside, the bed and desk were just as tidy and clean.

He sorted through his memories and confirmed that the original master of this body had left the shop several days ago to go to the Secret Assembly Hall for a gathering of the Sun’s believers—that had been his last time leaving. The details were already hazy, but there was no impression of him tidying up the rooms before he went.

So that meant… there was someone else?

Someone else had been living together with this cultist? A relative?

Duncan frowned slightly. While he searched for matching clues in his mind, he walked over to the desk in the small room. His eyes passed over the neatly arranged paper and stationery and finally settled on a book.

The book lay in the most prominent spot on the desk. Its cover was a deep blue, decorated with gears and connecting rods, and the title was written in elegant cursive letters:

“The Art of Steam and Gears – General Textbook III”

Duncan frowned. He already vaguely realized that this room must belong to “someone else”, yet he still picked up the book without thinking.

There were no books to read on the Vanished, and he had not found a single scrap of writing in the master bedroom or anywhere else in the shop. This book in his hands might help him understand more about this world.

He opened the cover, and the illustrated pages came into view. It really was a “textbook” on engineering techniques and the principles of steam machinery, and between its paragraphs he could see many notes left by the book’s owner.

The neat, delicate handwriting looked like it belonged to a young woman.

Duncan rubbed his forehead. The original master of this body seemed to have had almost no relatives or friends. Most of the scenes—or rather impressions—in his memories carried a cold, lonely tone. But after combing through them several times, he finally “recalled” someone, dimly… a girl with dark brown hair.

She seemed to be the only person that the cultist named Ron still cared about, in a way, when he breathed his last.

Duncan’s gaze fell on the pages. He did not bother with the parts full of specific technical terms and diagrams. Instead, he picked out the sections that read more like editors’ notes and discussions of concepts.

A line of text suddenly caught his eye:

“…Fire, or to be more precise, the special flames produced by burning oils from the Deep Sea and crystalline minerals from nearshore deposits, is the keystone that keeps modern society running and protects our civilization…

“The prosperity and order of modern civilization are built on fire and steam… Clean, convenient electricity cannot replace the exorcising effect of fire, nor can it keep large machines running steadily for long periods of time… Experiments have proved that steam is the most stable form of power when exposed to the influence of the deep layers of space…

“In this chapter, we will discuss three typical designs for steam cores and explain the mechanical principles and design ideas behind them…”

Duncan’s eyes froze for a moment.

He remembered the gas lamps, torches, and oil lamps he had seen everywhere in the sewers before, and the gas streetlights along the roads of the city. He also remembered the puzzlement he had felt when he saw that lone electric lamp in the shop.

So… this was the reason behind those seemingly “strange” things?

Even in the risky environment of the sewers, people still insisted on using open-flame lamps. Even with electricity already developed to a certain level, they still lit the streets outside with gas lamps—all because “fire” could, to some extent, hold back the spread of certain “Dangerous Aberrations”?

A vague, hard-to-name feeling rose in Duncan’s heart. His gaze moved down the page to the complex schematics, the dense notes, and the careful annotations left by the book’s owner.

They were machines he simply could not understand.

And they were definitely not the “steam engines” he had known in his previous life.

The intricate gears, the extremely complex cylinders, and the pipes and valves linking each part all went far beyond the concept of a simple steam engine. They looked more like devices that had jumped out of some fantastical illustration manual, full of a strange, contradictory beauty.

This was the “heart” that kept this world’s civilization moving forward.

Lost in thought, Duncan slowly put the book back where it had been.

Because he could no longer make sense of it at all.

As someone from Earth, even with his past experience as a teacher, he could not make heads or tails of these steam-powered mechanisms pushed to such extremes.

Yet even so, a faint sense of insight still surfaced in his heart:

The development of civilization in this world seemed to be walking a path completely different from the one he knew.

To survive in a world surrounded by threats, mortal nations had taken on all sorts of bizarre forms. But no matter how strange a world was, as long as it could still be called a “civilization”, there had to be reasons and logic behind how it had grown to this point.

The gas lamps burning in the sewers, the electric lamp glowing in the shop, and the steam engines drawn in the book—born from the gathered wisdom of countless people—all faintly revealed a certain… tenacity.