Chapter 45

Chapter 45: History

This feeling was very strange.

Duncan could clearly sense things far away. He could feel the Vanished drifting on the vast Boundless Sea. That living ghost ship, under Goathead’s control, was constantly opening up new routes on the enchanted sea chart. A cursed doll whose head was not very solid wandered through the cabins like an explorer, getting to know every corner of the ship. The deep, dark sea rose and fell around them, hiding countless strange things.

At the same time, through another line of sight, he was sitting in an antique shop in the Lower City of the Pland city-state. The sounds of people and carts from the street drifted in and only made the quiet inside more obvious. A human girl named Nina sat across from him, taking small bites of the cheapest cake the Lower City could offer.

He was Captain Duncan, master of the Vanished, a moving calamity on the Boundless Sea—yet here he sat like an ordinary person, eating his breakfast in the calm heart of the city.

He did not know if it was an illusion, but he felt that some part of his heart that had always been hanging and uneasy was slowly settling down. Maybe it was the nerves that had been taut for so long on the ghost ship, or maybe it was something else, but whatever it was, it did not feel like a bad thing.

It seemed she sensed his gaze. Nina, still eating her cake, suddenly looked up at him curiously and asked: “Uncle Duncan, aren’t you going to eat?”

Duncan glanced at the food on her plate. “Is that enough for you?”

“It’s enough. Eating too many sweets is bad for you.”

“Mm.”

He nodded, picked up the cake, and took a bite. He carefully tasted the rich flavor he had not enjoyed in a long time, feeling the crude sweetness slowly melt in his mouth. Then he clearly sensed this body begin to process the food he had eaten.

His heart settled a little. Things were as he had expected.

This body was much more “useful” than the first shell he had occupied. Its “parts” were all intact, and it had not been dead for long. His soul had taken over and almost restarted its life force without a break. It was completely different from that open-chested corpse from before.

Now he had breath, blood flowing, and a beating heart. The heartbeat seemed a bit slow, but still within the range of a normal person.

He probably did not need to worry about the body rotting anymore, or plan how to soak himself in preservative. And this way it was also much less likely he would be exposed in front of ordinary people.

But there was one thing Duncan still was not sure about.

He knew this body should have been ill. In the memories he had devoured, the impression of long, heavy sickness was deeper than any other memory. The strong liquor and painkillers he had found in the cabinet earlier were proof enough.

He did not know exactly what illness this body had suffered. The time and cause of the sickness belonged to very old memories, already blurred. But one thing was clear: right now, aside from the weakness that came with an ordinary person’s body, he felt no problems in this body at all.

Had the disease vanished? Had this body healed itself because of his walk in the Spirit Realm? Or was his projected soul limited in what it could feel, so he simply could not sense the problem, while this body’s health was still slowly getting worse?

Duncan thought about this as he calmly ate. Then he suddenly looked at Nina, who was eating across from him, and asked: “Don’t you need to go to school today?”

Nina lived in the Lower City. Her family’s finances were not good, but the city-state of Pland had clearly reached a point where basic education was quite common. She studied at a school run together by the Church and the City Hall, focusing on steam engine studies. This kind of school was like a vocational high school, meant mainly to send trained steam artificers to the factories and the Cathedral.

Half of Nina’s tuition was paid by her uncle, and the other half came from City Hall subsidies.

For a city-state that had entered the industrial age, it was worthwhile even for the authorities to pay to train artificers like her. And it was undeniable that these very practical schools at least solved the literacy problem for commoners.

Nina was eager to learn. In her uncle’s memories, this girl had done quite well in all her classes.

“I don’t have any classes this morning,” Nina said with a nod. “Only two history lessons in the afternoon. And I need to go tell Madam White that I won’t be staying in the dormitory for the next few days…”

Duncan suddenly stopped what he was doing and looked at Nina carefully. “Don’t you think staying here to take care of someone like me will hold you back? You could live at school for long stretches. That might be better for your studies.”

Nina froze. She stared blankly at her “Uncle Duncan,” then suddenly got angry. “You shouldn’t talk like that! You’re only sick, that’s all. You just need to obey the doctor and take your medicine. Dad and Mom entrusted you to me…”

“No, your dad and mom entrusted you to me,” Duncan corrected her seriously, picking his words with the help of the memories in his mind. “You were only six years old then.”

“But I’m seventeen now,” Nina said, puffing out her cheeks as she stabbed her fork into the last bit of cake. “You’re even worse than I am at taking care of yourself. If I really moved out, you’d have the room in a mess in less than three days. In fact, you can let me help take care of the shop, at least with the cleaning. The window is so dirty you can barely see through it…”

Duncan listened helplessly to the girl’s rambling lecture. He had not expected an offhand “test” sentence to get such a big reaction.

But slowly, he could not help smiling.

From this girl named Nina, he felt a kind of warmth… a warmth like standing in sunlight.

“All right, I was only speaking casually,” he said, shaking his head as he stirred the last bit of soup in his bowl. “History in the afternoon… how have your history lessons been going lately?”

“Uncle Duncan, are you really all right?” Nina opened her eyes wide in surprise. “You never… well, at least in the last two years, you’ve never asked about my schoolwork.”

Duncan opened his mouth, about to say something, but the girl went on talking on her own: “We’ve been doing ancient history lately. Old Mr. Morris has been telling us about what happened after the Great Annihilation… To be honest, it’s pretty interesting. Ancient history sounds a lot like stories. It’s much more fun than modern or recent history.”

Duncan thought for a moment, then asked seriously: “Sounds like you’re doing well. Then let me test you. What is the basic idea of the Great Annihilation?”

Uncle Duncan was very strange today. Nina could not say exactly how, but he was different from usual.

But Nina did not think too hard about it. Compared to her uncle’s slightly odd words and actions, what mattered more to this simple young lady was that Uncle Duncan finally seemed to have some spirit, and even looked to be in a good mood.

She was happy that Uncle Duncan had asked about something she had just learned.

So she began to explain, wearing a proud smile, and told Duncan what she had just studied:

“The Great Annihilation happened about ten thousand years ago. For reasons we still don’t understand, minority peoples with unusual cultures, like the elves, the Senkin, and the Gyproans, record different dates in their own calendars. But overall, scholars agree that the Great Annihilation took place at the end of the Age of Order about ten thousand years ago…”

Duncan listened with a calm face.

Inside, his mind was full of questions.

Elves? Senkin? Gyproans? What was this? So there were other intelligent races on land besides humans? And elves… was that the same kind of “elves” he was thinking of? Were there elven city-states out on the Boundless Sea, living in the steam age?

All sorts of bizarre images rose in his mind, while Nina’s voice still came from across the table:

“…Different city-states record the Great Annihilation in slightly different ways, but there are some things they agree on. Before the Great Annihilation, the Age of Order was far more prosperous, stable, and safe than today. There were vast continents then. The seas were not as endless as they are now. And neither the seas nor the lands had anything like the ‘border of the Mortal Realm’ that we talk about today…

“The time after the Great Annihilation is called the Deep Sea era. The Deep Sea era has lasted to this day and shows no sign of ending. Its biggest feature is that the Boundless Sea covers almost the whole world. Less than one tenth of the old era’s land remains, and it is broken up into islands of many sizes or ‘mistbound expanses’. The city-states we have now stand on the more stable islands, and all kinds of ocean-going ships are the only way for the islands to trade and stay in contact.

“In the early Deep Sea era, the remnant folk of the Old World suffered heavy blows. The old civilizations were almost all destroyed. The first kingdom to rise from the ruins was the ancient kingdom of Critt, the oldest civilization of the Deep Sea era that we can still trace. Even though that ancient kingdom lasted less than a hundred years, it left behind many legacies that deeply influenced later times. These include the very first and simplest ways of classifying the many anomalies and manifestations of the Deep Sea era, as well as a lot of precious knowledge on how to survive in the Deep Sea era…”