Chapter 459

Chapter 459: The Person in the Mirror.

Shirley left with Dog, who was still a little uneasy. Vanna and Morris left as well. The captain’s cabin grew quiet, leaving only Duncan, Alice, and the dozing pigeon.

Alice was wiping the furnishings and windows in the room. Duncan sat behind the desk, lost in long thought.

A creaking sound came from the desk. Goathead’s skull slowly turned toward Duncan: “Are you still thinking about Rahm, the God of Wisdom?”

“Not the God of Wisdom – Gods,” Duncan said. He leaned back in his chair, a thoughtful look on his face. “The Gods… what kind of connection do they really have with this world?”

“Who knows?” Goathead muttered. “The scriptures of each church paint them as the makers and protectors of mortal order. Many cultists believe the opposite. They say the Gods twisted the world and even stole the credit for the Genesis Protocol. The things Morris saw in that book, The Blasphemous Tome, offered another fresh explanation. The ‘lost Elder Kings’ it spoke of seem to be the deities we have now. Maybe all these views are wrong, or maybe each of them holds a part of the truth…”

Goathead rambled on, then shook his head again.

“But if you want my opinion, my view is… they don’t seem very useful. They don’t really make the world any better, and they haven’t made it much worse either.”

“But for most ordinary people in this world, the protection of the Gods is real,” Duncan said casually. “That shelter let most mortals survive.”

“Yes. Survive. A way of preserving the status quo,” Goathead said slowly. “It was like Frostholm’s state over the past fifty years. Before the balance broke, no one knew how many shadows of disaster had piled up beneath it. But at least everyone was still alive.”

Duncan neither agreed nor disagreed with Goathead’s judgment. He only thought for a while before speaking again: “When Dog thinks, Dog enters Rahm’s sight. There are also many famous examples in history of people ‘blessed by the gods’. They all suddenly received a gaze in the middle of their daily lives and formed a link with the Four Gods. So can we see it this way? The Four Gods set up a kind of ‘monitoring’ or ‘scanning’ system over the beings in the mortal world. They sense certain special nodes to check the state of the Mortal Realm. Does that actually mean their interference with and sense of the present world are indirect and limited?”

“…Those True God churches won’t like the way you put that. It sounds like you are studying some kind of machine, with no reverence at all for the deities.”

“Reverence is the farthest thing from understanding. I don’t want to revere them. I just want to understand them,” Duncan said calmly. “After all, we have already helped them clean up two messes.”

…

Footsteps sounded in the long corridor of the great cathedral. Their steady echoes seemed to knock on the time piled up inside this ancient building.

Agatha, in a black dress, walked toward the depths of the sanctuary. She brought no attendants with her. Only her own shadow kept company with this body that had lost its life yet still moved. On both sides of the corridor, the light of gas lamps and candles crossed and mingled in the wall niches, making the shadow cast on the ground dim and unsteady.

Only after she returned to her own room and closed the door did this archbishop and gatekeeper, who had seemed calm and steady all the way, finally relax. She leaned back against the door and let out a long sigh.

She no longer needed to breathe, but a “sigh” was a sign of being human. She still used it as a symbol to help herself relax.

After all, she did not want to seem… too much like a corpse.

Order in the great cathedral had been restored. The smaller cathedrals across the city-state were also slowly getting back on track. The whole city was still tense, but after the Sea Mist Fleet stepped in, the chaos in each district, especially criminal cases, had been quickly contained.

On the other hand, the distribution of supplies and the work of handling the dead and survivors were still a tangled mess. Severe staff shortages still troubled every department. But after the Sea Mist Fleet entered the city, they had “miraculously” found a large group of professionals from every corner of the city-state. These people either had administrative skills or knew the city’s grassroots operations well, and they were placed into City Hall.

According to City Hall, the people “recommended” by the Sea Mist Fleet were learning and taking over each department’s work at an astonishing speed. In just a few more days, the problem of staff shortages everywhere would be greatly eased.

At the same time, the public opinion work needed for the fleet’s entry into the city, and the propaganda focused on General Tyrian Abnomar himself, were steadily moving forward. The reorganization and merging of the city-state’s remaining navy with the Sea Mist Fleet had also begun.

The new governor had not yet held an official inauguration ritual, but the city had already fallen under his control at an amazing speed.

This was the kind of development the officials of Frostholm’s authority had once only imagined in nightmares. But for the Frostholm of today, it was all a good thing.

Agatha could finally relax a little.

A corpse did not get tired, but her mind still needed a break.

After leaning against the door for a few minutes, Agatha shook her head, then slowly walked to her dressing table and sat down to rest.

Her figure appeared in the mirror above the dressing table.

The feeling of being watched made Agatha jerk her head up.

There was no one else in the room, and she did not sense any unfamiliar presence.

Yet the sense of being watched was definitely not an illusion.

The blind priest with her eyes covered lifted her head and carefully felt for any tiny movement around her, sensing the flow of every breath of air. Her “gaze” slowly swept over the room and then over the mirror on the dressing table.

In her sight, the lifeless furnishings in the room showed up as vague, dim outlines, giving off a chill like that of a grave.

But in the next second, the feeling of being watched vanished.

The figure in the mirror shifted its gaze.

Agatha in front of the dressing table suddenly froze. It was as if she had sensed something instead. After a brief hesitation, she slowly raised her arm and reached toward the mirror.

A cold, hard feeling met her fingers. It was a lifeless sheet of glass.

The figure in the mirror hesitated. After hesitating for who knew how long, she also raised her arm and slowly brought her fingers forward.

The feeling of fingertip touching fingertip came all at once, with a faint warmth between them.

In the next instant, new light and shadow appeared in Agatha’s murky darkness of sight. In that lifeless mirror surface, a hazy outline that gave off a faint glow suddenly appeared.

The two of them faced each other quietly across the mirror. The room fell into a brief silence.

After a long time, the Agatha in front of the mirror finally broke the silence: “You’re there?”

There was a trace of hesitation in her voice.

“Mm,” a voice answered, as if it had slipped straight into her mind. “I’m here.”

“When… did you appear?”

“The key,” the voice in Agatha’s mind said calmly. “I have been here since the moment you took that key.”

Agatha did not speak for a while.

The feeling was… strange. She could clearly tell that the voice in her mind was her own voice. She could even feel the faint emotions that came with it when it spoke. Yet she also clearly knew that the one talking to her was another being. It was not a hallucination in her own mind, not a personality split off by madness, not some kind of “attachment” of herself.

Unbelievable.

“Unbelievable,” the her in the mirror said. “If I had to compare it to something, it feels a bit like a split personality. But it clearly isn’t…”

“Even the best psychiatrist probably couldn’t solve this one.”

“Let’s not give the psychiatrists in the city-state more trouble. They already have nothing but trouble these days.”

Agatha suddenly raised her hand and rubbed her brow.

Talking with “another self” like this was a feeling she had never had before. While they spoke, she kept having the illusion that she could no longer tell which one was the “real” her. There was no actual confusion in her mind yet, but she still could not help stopping to sort out her thoughts.

After a moment, she lifted her head again and “looked” at herself in the mirror.

“So that key… kept your soul? And then used it as a medium to send you into my…”

She trailed off there. She did not seem to know how to describe her current state.

The shadow in front of her… was it in her mind, in her senses, or… just a projection on some psychological level?

“I don’t know either,” the voice in her head answered. “I don’t know if I even have a soul. I don’t know the details of the process, and I don’t know how that key did all this. My consciousness was in a chaotic state for a long time, and I’ve only been awake for the past two days.”

Then the voice hesitated for a moment. A few seconds later, it went on: “From the looks of it now, that key should be able to store and move memories. But probably only the Queen of Frostholm knows all of its secrets.”

“The Queen of Frostholm…” Agatha muttered, almost to herself. “It seems we should tell the Captain about this…”

“…But in theory, we should first report to the Death Sanctuary headquarters,” the Agatha in the mirror reminded her.

The Agatha in front of the mirror paused at that. Her expression shifted a little before she spoke again, hesitating: “That… does sound right. But the Death Sanctuary is now cruising at the far edge of the civilized world. They may not have time to care about this kind of ‘personal matter’.”

She stopped there and lifted her head to look at the mirror.

“What do you think?”

The Agatha in the mirror thought for a moment.

Thoughts and memories flowed slowly between them. Understanding and emotion echoed on both sides of the mirror.

A faint green flame appeared in the eyes of the Agatha in the mirror.

“I also think we should tell the Captain. He is clearly very experienced when it comes to mirrors.”