Chapter 452

Chapter 452: Everything Is Permitted

Half a century ago, the Frostholm Queen’s Abyssal Trench Project had been launched to find and solve the problem of Boiling Gold under the city-state.

Generations of Governors had inherited secrets about the Boiling Gold, the Queen, The curse, the Elder Gods in The Deep Sea, and the power of the Abyssal Lord, which had formed a real projection inside the city-state and bored out this huge hollow region beneath it…

Every one of these pieces of information was shocking.

But for Duncan, even all of that together was not as shocking as one fact: that the Elder Gods who had invaded the city-state were replicas.

Vanna realized the weight of that line too. As an Inquisitor who dealt with heretics and malevolent spirits for a living, her expression was unusually serious. She turned her gaze to the “giant pillar” that held up the cavern. Only after a long moment did she speak:

“First of all, this thing really is a remaining part of the ‘Elder Gods’ that invaded the city-state… And its source is still down in The Deep Sea beneath the city. So what Agatha just said about this ‘replica’ actually has two explanations.”

“Yes, two explanations,” Duncan nodded. “The first is that the ‘source’ on the sea floor is the real one. In that case, the corrupted mass it projected into the city-state can, in a sense, be seen as a replica, a copy.

“The second explanation…”

He paused, looked up at the giant pillar that supported the whole cave, then let out a breath.

“The second explanation is that the ‘source’ on the sea floor is also a replica. The other Agatha, in her final moment, touched not only the Elder God tendril in this cavern. Through that tendril, she also learned the truth in The Deep Sea. But time was short, and she had no chance to leave more explanation.”

The place went quiet for a while.

Alice lifted her head. Her curious gaze swept over everyone. She had not fully understood what they were talking about, but she was trying very hard to listen and make sense of it. After a long time, she tugged on Duncan’s arm:

“It sounds kind of scary?”

“Yes. And it’s hard to say whether the first possibility is scarier or the second,” Duncan answered. Even as he said “scarier,” there was a faint smile in his eyes. He rubbed Alice’s hair, comforting the doll who clearly did not understand but was already nervous: “You don’t need to worry so much. This won’t be more trouble than mirror world Frostholm.”

“Yes, it won’t be more trouble than mirror world Frostholm—as long as we don’t let that ‘source’ at the bottom of the sea keep growing,” Agatha said. She turned her head to “look” into Duncan’s eyes. “Just like you said last time, we still need to investigate under Frostholm again. We have to see whether the ‘Elder Gods’ that invaded the Mortal Realm are still there…”

Duncan gave a soft “mm.” He knew Agatha had not been idle and had surely already started preparing for this, so he did not press her. But just then, something flickered at the edge of his vision.

Something glowing flashed in Agatha’s right hand. It seemed to be a piece of metal.

“Agatha, what do you have in your hand?”

“In my hand?” Agatha was startled. She lifted her hand without thinking, and only then did she suddenly feel the foreign object in her palm—cold metal, yet already warmed a little by her body heat.

It was a strangely shaped brass key.

“The key…” Vanna stared at it in surprise, then suddenly understood. “Ah, this is the one you mentioned—the key that Governor Winston passed to the other ‘Agatha’ in the end? The key the Frostholm Queen left behind?”

Duncan’s eyes changed a little: “Let me see it.”

“Of course.” Agatha did not hesitate. She at once placed the key into Duncan’s hand.

The key was cast from brass. The handle was a thick “infinity” symbol, and the front end had no teeth. Instead, it was a round bar with grooves, like… the wind-up key used to wind a doll.

Alice leaned in close, hanging off Duncan’s arm: “Let me see, let me see… Huh? This is the key? It doesn’t look like the keys I’ve seen… What is it for?”

No one answered.

Every gaze landed on the doll, on Miss Doll herself.

“Why are you all looking at me?” Alice finally realized, pointed at herself, and asked: “Did I mess something up again?”

“When you look at this key, don’t you feel anything special?” Duncan lowered his head and looked into Alice’s eyes. “Like a sense of familiarity, or a strong urge to touch it?”

“No…” Alice shook her head, completely lost. “I’ve never seen it before.”

Vanna leaned closer and whispered into Duncan’s ear: “Captain, do you think…”

“I remember Nina mentioned,” Duncan said slowly, “that there is a keyhole on Alice’s back.”

At that, Agatha “looked” toward the doll nearby—the doll created by Brother.

In that instant, it felt as if everything connected. Points scattered across time and space linked into crooked lines inside this cavern that had once been corrupted by an Elder God.

The key left by the Frostholm Queen, and the doll “Anomaly 099,” whose face was exactly the same as the Frostholm Queen’s, were the two end points of that line.

Yet under everyone’s gaze, Alice simply looked left and right in confusion. Then she raised her arm and tried hard to feel around her back.

“I can’t reach it,” she said, a little wronged and a little apologetic. “My clothes are in the way.”

“We’ll talk about it when we get back. This… needs caution,” Duncan said in a low voice, breaking the heavy mood in the cavern. Then he raised his head again and looked at Agatha. “I want to take this key with me. Is that all right?”

“Technically… this key is a legacy passed down by the Frostholm Governors. And according to Governor Winston, it also holds the ‘information’ the Frostholm Queen left behind. But…”

Agatha paused, then gently shook her head.

“It’s all in the past now. Of course you can take it.”

“Thank you.” Duncan did not stand on ceremony. He put the key into the beak of the pigeon resting on his shoulder. With a flash of eerie green flame, Ai and the key vanished from his shoulder together. A second later, the pigeon returned, but the key was gone.

It had already been sent to the ship, into the hands of Duncan’s true body.

On the Vanished, Duncan turned the newly delivered key over in his fingers. In the hollow underground space beneath Frostholm, Duncan turned back to look once more at the giant pillar that held up the cavern and knocked lightly on its hard, icy stone surface.

“We should leave,” he said.

The cavern was huge. Even with the flames of spirit form to help, the area the group had explored so far was only a small part of the hollow. But for Duncan, the information gathered here was already enough.

He needed time to slowly sort out and digest what he had gained. Follow-up exploration… could be left to Agatha and Agatha’s subordinates.

After confirming that no Elder God corruption remained in the cavern and that the cavern itself had a stable supporting structure, Agatha could now feel relatively safe bringing her subordinates here.

Following the path marked by spirit flame, the group safely withdrew from the vast hollow. Then they boarded the shaft lift and returned to the mine tunnels above.

On the way out of the Boiling Gold mine, Duncan asked Agatha, curious: “What are your thoughts about that hollow below?”

“My thoughts?” Agatha thought for a moment. “I’ll probably lead a few more expeditions. At least enough to understand the surface of the cavern and the area around that huge pillar. If we find anything valuable in the process, I’ll share it with you at once. As for after that…”

She stopped there, as if she were thinking very carefully, and only then said slowly: “After that, I’ll suggest that the city-state find a way to mine the Boiling Gold in the cavern. Under the condition that we avoid a collapse of the hollow and avoid damaging that ‘pillar’, we should try to bring that Boiling Gold out. Of course, how to actually do that is up to the professionals in City Hall.”

“You’re not worried about the ‘hidden danger’ in that Boiling Gold?” Duncan asked casually. “After all, it might be something the Elder Gods left behind.”

“…The city-state has to stay alive first. Only then can we think about anything else,” Agatha said with a small shake of her head. “And after I ‘saw’ what was inside that cavern, I thought of something.”

“Oh?”

“If the Boiling Gold under Frostholm is something left behind after the Elder Gods’ power drilled through, then what about the other city-states on The Boundless Sea? Are we really sure that nothing is wrong under any city-state’s foundations?”

The group fell silent again.

“After the ore veins from the Queen’s era ran dry, Frostholm spent another fifty years mining Boiling Gold from the mirror world world,” Agatha went on. “We instinctively believed that Boiling Gold mined from the mirror world world, like everything else from there, was just a replica. But after the mirror world city-state was destroyed, the Boiling Gold did not disappear. It even left behind a new ‘rich deposit’ in the underground cavern we just found…

“The only possible explanation is that Boiling Gold created by the power of the Elder Gods is not a ‘distortion’.”

“If Boiling Gold created by the Elder Gods isn’t distortion, then it can only be a natural part of the world,” Duncan said, his tone thoughtful. “That already sounds close to the Annihilators’ ‘Holy Lord created the world’ theory.”

“Yes. It already counts as something heretical,” Agatha admitted, calm and open.

“But you don’t look shaken.”

Agatha stopped walking. She slowly raised her head. Her gaze seemed to pass through the black band over her eyes and rest quietly ahead.

At the end of the passage was the mine’s surface exit. Bright sunlight poured in from there, warm and clear.

In Agatha’s perception, the entire world was still very cold, as cold as a tomb.

But she knew that sunlight was warm.

“Just like I said earlier, the city-state has to survive first,” this devout priestess of the Goddess said softly. She folded her hands over her chest as if in prayer. “There is only one kind of heretic in this world: anyone who hinders our survival is a heretic. Besides that, everything is permitted.”