Chapter 457

Chapter 457: Wisdom’s Favor (?)

The awkward, delicate silence in the captain’s cabin lasted for a long time.

At last, it was Duncan who spoke first and broke the silence. He turned his gaze from Dog and looked seriously at old Mr. Morris beside him: “Logically, do you think this makes sense?”

Morris blinked slowly. His face was twisted with confusion, like someone dragged out of bed at two thirty in the morning to revise a thesis. He felt that the trials he had faced back when he advanced to become a Saint were much easier than this puzzle. After struggling for a long time, he finally squeezed out one line: “In all recorded history… no one has ever heard of such a thing… This is beyond what I know.”

“Of course it is beyond it. Dog might be the only Abyssal demon in history who can read,” Duncan said, rubbing his brow with a complicated expression. “Does your doctrine say anywhere that the God of Wisdom gives divine blessing to Abyssal demons?”

“How could there be such a line?” Morris looked like he had just seen a ghost. “Abyssal demons are enemies of civilized society. Not just the God of Wisdom. None of the other Three Gods would have such a rule in their doctrine…”

As soon as he finished, Vanna, who had been stunned for a while, suddenly remembered something and quietly added: “But the doctrine of the God of Wisdom also says that Rahm watches equally over every living being that has a mind and spirit. He gives them the wisdom to understand the world, and uses the foolishness of the Veil to shield them from the mad and terrible truth… It does not clearly exclude Abyssal demons from the list of ‘intelligent beings’.”

“What Abyssal demons have a mind and spirit?” Morris blurted out. But in the next second his expression turned strange as he slowly turned his head to look at Dog, who was lying on the floor, behaving itself.

“At Dog’s learning speed, by this time next year we could almost sign it up for the middle school entrance exam,” Duncan said in a dry tone. “Maybe one day it will even sit at the same desk as Nina.”

“…I’m a bit lost. I need to calm down,” Morris finally said, and his body swayed a little. He rubbed his forehead and slowly made his way to a chair. After he sat down, he looked up again. His eyes were complicated as he stared at the dog in the middle of the room. “You… besides those scenes that appeared in your mind, did you feel anything else? Did you hear Him speak to you? Or did you suddenly gain a brand-new understanding of some knowledge?”

“No.” Dog shook its head hard. “I just saw those lights twice in a row, and both times they scared me. Other than that I did not hear or feel anything…”

“So you only saw ‘Him’? You did not receive any revelation?” Morris seemed to have calmed down and started to think seriously. “Then did you feel any increase in your ability to calculate or remember? After gazing at those ‘lights’ for a long time under the gaze, when you returned to the Mortal Realm, did your vision feel different from before?”

Dog kept shaking its head: “No, none of that. And I did not gaze at those ‘lights’ for a long time. I just took one look, then I was pulled back to the Mortal Realm.”

“Just one look? Then you were pulled back to the Mortal Realm?” Morris froze. Clearly this also clashed with what he knew. “That is not right… The God of Wisdom’s gaze comes with a long mental exchange. Even if mortals cannot understand that exchange, the whole process is definitely longer than ‘one look’… How were you pulled back?”

“It felt like Shirley pulled me back,” Dog said after thinking about it. It raised its head and rubbed against Shirley’s arm. “Right when I started to feel like I was going to be ‘taken away’ by those lights, I felt a great force come from the symbiotic pact chain, and then I woke up. But Shirley herself does not seem to remember.”

At once, all the eyes in the room turned to Shirley again.

The girl, now the focus of everyone’s gaze, shrank her neck by instinct. But right after that she showed a proud smile, like a child bragging after doing something impressive.

Only Duncan’s expression grew stranger as it shifted a few times.

Vanna was still puzzled: “I have never heard of a symbiotic pact between Abyssal demons and humans having the power to block a deity’s gaze… Could it be because the symbiotic pact between Shirley and Dog is closer than that of ordinary Annihilators?”

“Ahem, maybe what pulled Dog back was not the power of the symbiotic pact,” Duncan coughed twice. He raised his hand and pointed at Shirley, who was still grinning foolishly. “It might be the power of illiteracy.”

Vanna: “…?”

Shirley: “…?”

Everyone stared, speechless, and Shirley’s expression changed by the second. Morris looked at Duncan in shock. He had always known that the captain’s way of thinking was broader than most people’s, but he had never guessed it would be broad in this direction.

However, after a short moment of shock, Morris could not help following this line of thought. The more he thought about it… the more it somehow seemed reasonable?

“Maybe at that moment there was a struggle over Dog in the supernatural field. On one side was the God of Wisdom’s gaze, on the other was its illiterate partner. And in the end…” Duncan rubbed his temples and sighed. “The despairing illiterate defeated the deity who wanted to recruit a student.”

“Logically… logically…” Morris opened his mouth and muttered the word several times, then gave up and spread his hands. “Forget it. I do not know how to work out the logic either. If I wrote a paper about this, the scholars of Morka would probably fight to the blood in the city center. Let us just assume things really happened this way.”

A strange and hard-to-hold-in mood filled the captain’s cabin. Shirley stood in the middle of the room and looked like she was about to cry. She looked at Duncan, then at Morris, and finally pointed at Dog with a miserable face: “Then… then did I hold Dog back? It was… it clearly was…”

In that moment, and maybe for the only time in her life, the thought that she should study hard really rose up in Shirley’s mind. But the next second, Duncan’s voice cut off her thought: “Do not rush to conclusions yet. Maybe… this matter is not as simple as we think.”

Shirley dropped her sadness at once: “Huh?”

Duncan did not answer her question right away. Instead, he looked at Dog: “Dog, you just said that while you were gazing at those lights you felt like you were going to be ‘taken away’?”

Dog nodded at once.

Duncan turned to Morris again: “Would someone blessed by the God of Wisdom feel like they were about to be ‘taken away’?”

“No.” Morris now also seemed to sense something. He shook his head, and his tone grew more serious. “A normal divine blessing is a friendly exchange and enlightenment of the mind. The one who receives divine blessing stays clear and joyful. They would never feel any tendency toward a runaway state.”

“If a Abyssal demon really had wisdom ‘poured’ into it by God of Wisdom Rahm, or received some kind of… divine favor, what would happen?” Duncan asked at once.

“I… do not know. This has never happened before. But by logic it could be a very dangerous process.” Morris’s mind worked fast, and he understood what Duncan meant at once. “There is a natural conflict between the four True Gods and the ‘Elder Gods’ that fall into mad runaway states. That conflict is not limited to fights in the literal sense. It is a basic ‘mutual exclusion’ between their creations or retainers. Abyssal demons, as the ‘offspring’ of the Abyssal Lord, naturally have the traits of chaos and corruption. Dog is no exception to this. And for the God of Wisdom…”

Morris paused and looked at Shirley with a grave face: “Even if my Lord has no malice, His radiance would still naturally break Dog’s mind. The result would be…”

Morris did not finish. The others in the room all fell into their own thoughts for a moment. Then the AI, which had been resting with eyes closed on the enchanted sea chart table, suddenly jumped up. As if it had gone crazy, it flapped its wings hard and let out a sharp, bizarre cry: “KZZZRT TATATATATATA!”

After that one loud shout, it shot up into the air, then dropped back onto the table with a thump like a rock. It flapped and stood up again, then casually strolled a few steps as if nothing had happened. It came to Goathead’s side, tilted its head, and said: “Wanna top up Q-coins?”

Everyone was startled by the pigeon spirit’s strange and glitchy behavior, and no one understood what it was yelling about. Duncan’s expression, however, changed slightly.

The next second, a sentence suddenly floated up in his mind: [Two incompatible operating systems sharing data would cause a fatal error.]

Along with a brief moment of sudden clarity and a head full of wild ideas, he slowly turned his head and looked at Dog.

“Could there be a data conflict between the Abyssal Lord and LH-02…” he muttered.

“Huh?” Dog did not react at first. “Captain, what did you say?”

“No, nothing.” Duncan knew it would be hard to explain how much he had just connected in that instant. He only waved his hand, then looked at Shirley, who was still staring at him in confusion. In his mind, he tore apart and rebuilt his vocabulary several times before finally finding something to say: “Shirley, pulling Dog back might have been good for it. I mean, only ‘might’. It may have kept Dog from being corrupted or swallowed by the will of God of Wisdom Rahm.”

Shirley’s mind turned quickly for a moment, and she seemed to finally understand what Duncan meant. The light returned to her eyes at once: “Ah, so… keeping my distance from that God of Wisdom is actually a good thing?”

What else could Duncan say? He could only nod.

The moment he nodded, Shirley’s face lit up with joy: “Then from now on I have a reason not to do homework, right?! I have to pull Dog back!”

Duncan: “…?!”

He had never thought that this would be the first thing this young lady would think of.

But before he could say anything this time, Morris reacted first: “It is not that simple.”

Shirley froze: “Huh?”

The old mister looked very serious: “My Lord does not grant divine blessing based only on knowledge level, and the other way around is also true. And from what I have seen these days, even if you did homework every day, it would not change how the God of Wisdom keeps you outside His door.”

Shirley: “??”