Chapter 421

Chapter 421: Driving Toward the Abyss.

“The key left by the Queen?”

Agatha’s expression changed at once. She fixed her eyes on Governor Winston.

But he looked even more surprised than she was. Winston’s eyes were full of shock: “You do not know? Then how did you come into this place?”

Agatha’s face grew serious. She realized the situation was not quite what she had imagined. When she first noticed that she could “enter” the stone wall, she had thought that Governor Winston, who came here before her, was the same kind of being as she was. But now it seemed that the Governor had used some other means.

He held more secrets than she had expected.

“I had my own way,” Agatha said slowly, and her tone carried a pressure she did not intend. “You just mentioned ‘the key left by the Queen.’ What exactly is it?”

Winston looked at the Gatekeeper with doubt, but after a moment of hesitation he let out a sigh of relief and reached into the pocket at his chest.

“Very well. We have already come this far. There is no need to keep secrets anymore.”

He took a small object from his pocket. It was a brass key with rich patterns on it. The handle of the key looked like a sideways “8,” or the infinity symbol in mathematics. Its head did not have the usual teeth of a common key, but was a short round rod with grooves.

Agatha studied the thing in his hand with interest. Suddenly she felt that it did not look like a key for opening doors at all, but rather like the kind of thing used to wind up a Doll or other clockwork device.

“A clockwork key?” she said before she could stop herself. “You mean this was left by Queen Ray Nora? Why is it in your hands as Governor?”

“The Governors passed it down from one to the next. This key is the gift the Queen left to the rebels, and also… the curse,” Winston said, pulling at the corner of his mouth in a bitter smile that even held a trace of fear. “From the moment the first Governor took the key, the Shadows behind Frostholm have hung over our heads, Gatekeeper.”

Agatha did not interrupt the weak-looking middle-aged man as he rambled on like someone muttering in his sleep. She waited patiently until he finished, then spoke in a calm tone: “You actually know the true situation of the Boiling Gold mine, do you not?”

“If you mean that the Boiling Gold mine already showed signs of drying up in the Queen’s time… yes, I knew,” Winston said with a soft sigh, speaking openly. “I am sorry. I knew from the very beginning what was going on with the door you found. But I thought there was still time, that I could set everything back on track before the situation grew worse. If that had worked, what you found would have been just an abandoned tunnel, and Frostholm… would still be the prosperous Frostholm it used to be.”

“I need an explanation, Governor,” Agatha said, her face serious and her tone a little cold. “If the Boiling Gold mine already ran dry in the Queen’s time, then what have we been digging up and shipping out for these past decades? And what is the link between the mine’s exhaustion and the Visions in the city-state today, and the actions of those cultists?”

“Boiling Gold is still Boiling Gold, Gatekeeper. What we dug up was Boiling Gold. What we shipped out was also Boiling Gold, true and solid,” Winston said, lifting his head with a face that looked half like a smile and half like a grimace. “It is not some corruption. We tested it, and they also tested it in the Queen’s time. If something looks like Boiling Gold, is used as Boiling Gold, and its effects and byproducts are no different from normal Boiling Gold, then without a doubt it should be Boiling Gold.”

“All of that really was Boiling Gold?!” Agatha opened her eyes wide. This answer was especially hard for her to imagine. “But the mine dried up decades ago. The ore now appearing in the tunnels…”

“That is exactly what is most terrifying and strange, is it not?” Winston said with a bitter smile. “The vein ran dry, yet soon new ore would fill certain corners where no one’s gaze ever reached. It was as if there were a false Frostholm, a city-state parallel to the Mortal Realm, pouring ore into our Mortal Realm world without end. Or rather… once the mine reached a certain depth, we were always mining from a mirror world world. Yet once those phantom, unreasonable things were dug out, no matter how we tested them, they all turned out to be real.”

Agatha listened with a stern face. These unbelievable truths crashed into her mind, which had already often felt hazy in recent days. But she still kept her calm and spoke in a low voice: “mirror world Frostholm… Governor, you are right. There really is a mirror world Frostholm. The fog now covering the city-state, and the replicas that appear again and again in the mist, all come from that mirror world city. That mirror world city-state is slowly Corrupting and replacing our Mortal Realm world.”

Winston’s expression changed slightly. Then he stayed silent for more than ten seconds before finally letting out a long sigh: “Ah, so this is the price for all that Boiling Gold.”

“Price? You make that word sound too light. It is not only you and me paying the price now, but everyone in the city-state, and most of them do not even know what is happening…”

“But most of them enjoy everything that the Boiling Gold trade brings. In this city of extreme cold, it is Boiling Gold that lets everyone have warm homes and enough food. It is Boiling Gold that lets us keep a fairly rich standard of life even after the sea cliffs collapsed, Gatekeeper,” Winston said.

Winston paused for a few seconds at this point, then waved his hand.

“You should know this. I am never extravagant. I own no houses and keep no private wealth. I do not even have an heir. Lady, everything I have done was not for my own desire.”

Agatha used her gaze on the Governor’s eyes, but deep within them she saw only weariness.

“None of them had any choice…”

She spoke in a low voice, almost as if talking to herself.

“It is that no one has any choice,” Winston said, shaking his head. “I know what you mean. The road we walk today, the price we pay today, was not chosen by the citizens of the city-state. But it was not chosen by me either. No one had any other path to take.

“The city-state is only so big. There is no second Frostholm on the Boundless Sea where we can stand. We need food, fuel, houses, and clean fresh water. We need Boiling Gold, even if it comes from a strange world of Shadows. Without Boiling Gold, in only one winter a quarter of the city-state would die. In a few years, the rest would go back step by step to the dark Age of City-States before the boom of industry, and we would go on losing a quarter or even more of our people…”

“Gatekeeper, rest a while. You are as tired as I am. Perhaps now we should accept one fact. The city-state is a steam locomotive driving toward the abyss, and everyone is sitting on it. The only difference between a Guardian of the City-State and an ordinary person is that the ordinary folk live, eat, and drink with their eyes covered, while we… keep our eyes open.”

Agatha paid no attention to Winston’s despairing speech. She simply stood there in the darkness without a word, feeling that unbearable cold spread toward her again from all around, feeling the blood in her veins slowly grow cold.

Then she broke the silence: “There was someone who made another choice.”

“…Yes, there was one. The people of Frostholm once called her ‘the Queen,’ and the history books call her the ‘mad Queen,’” Winston said with a laugh, though it was hard to tell whether he was laughing at the Queen or at himself. “A great Mortal. She even wanted to fight this sea itself, to fight the horror at the very bottom of the sea.”

“The Abyssal Trench Project…” Agatha said softly. All the clues she had gathered in the past finally came together in her mind, forming a clear path. “So the Abyssal Trench Project was not just a simple exploration plan like the records say… The Queen wanted to uncover the secret hidden deep beneath the city-state?!”

“We never knew why she thought the Boiling Gold that kept appearing in the mine was linked to the Deep Sea. But clearly she had found the right direction. The runaway state of the Abyssal Trench Project and the terrible fate she later faced prove that she had touched the true source. That is the most ironic thing about our world,” Winston said. He shifted his position beside the stump and raised his head to look at the endless chaos and crawling Shadows above. He spoke slowly: “Truth points to madness. Madness points to failure. Every step you take toward your goal is a step toward the abyss.”

Winston let out a sigh.

“She wanted to find out the truth of the Boiling Gold mine. She wanted to solve the hidden danger behind the city-state. She wanted to use her own wisdom and strength to fight the sea itself… all of that was good. But in the end, it only proved that she used up her fate ahead of time.”

“So you ‘successors’ decided not to walk her old path. You pretend to cover your eyes like everyone else and rush toward the abyss with this train, while the Queen who once tried to hit the brakes or change the tracks is written in the history books as a Madman bewitched by Subspace.”

“An old rule of Frostholm: the dead must make way for the living,” Winston said as he slowly turned his eyes to look at Agatha with his gaze. “If the way she is judged can help Frostholm quickly return to calm after turmoil, then a ruler who was once great would not mind, I think.”

Agatha wanted to say something, but in the end no words came out.

After a long time, she could only shake her head gently.

“That key… how did it end up in the hands of the first Governor?”