Chapter 46

Chapter 46: Anomalies and Visions

The Great Annihilation was the turning point of all history in this world, and it was also the beginning of what people now called the Deep Sea Age.

From what Nina told him, Duncan finally roughly understood what kind of earth-shaking change had once happened in this world, and he also realized that this world had not always been as strange and dangerous as it was now.

If the historical records were true, the world before the Great Annihilation had been a prosperous, safe paradise.

At that time, the ocean was not yet the Boundless Sea. The limited waters back then did not cover more than ninety-five percent of the world’s surface like they did now. Humans still lived on wide, safe land, and even in the seas there were no dangerous Visions such as the Spirit Realm, the Abyssal Deep, or Subspace.

The “Age of Order” written in the history books actually felt more like the world Duncan was familiar with. Modern people might look back with shock and disbelief at that Age of Antiquity where no “Anomalies” existed, but to Duncan, it was the current shape of the world that was utterly wrong.

The history books did not give a detailed explanation of this key event, the “Great Annihilation”. Archaeologists had been working on it for years, but the city-states and peoples still fiercely disagreed about ancient history. No one knew how the so?called Great Annihilation had actually happened, or what the disaster itself really was. Thick chaos and mist shrouded that upheaval, and beyond the mist lay only the Deep Sea Age they lived in now.

Seawater from who knew where drowned more than ninety percent of the land. The survivors of civilization built city-states and fleets on the remaining islands and scraps of ground. The Boundless Sea and the mists over it brought with them strange things called “Anomalies” and “Visions”, which still threatened the survival of civilization to this day.

But Nina did not know that the man in front of her was a ghost captain from another land, quietly drawing knowledge from her words. She only thought this was Uncle Duncan testing her homework. Uncle Duncan had not been in such a good mood for a long time. She felt simply happy, and even felt that this moment was especially precious, because she worried that at any time Uncle Duncan might turn back into how he had been before… and from her past experience, that was almost unavoidable.

As soon as the liquor stopped working or the painkillers ran out, Uncle Duncan would become especially irritable, quick?tempered, and hysterical.

So before Uncle Duncan fell ill again, she wanted to show him all the progress she had made. Maybe that could make his good mood last for another day or two.

“…Old Mr. Morris is very interested in the history of the Critt Kingdom. He is an expert in that field. He told us that even though the ancient kingdom of Critt only lasted for a hundred years, it was the first civilization to stand up from the ruins and fight against Anomalies and Visions after the Deep Sea Age began. The experience they gathered in that hundred years still guided most people in the world even today. The most important part of it is their way of classifying ‘Anomalies’ and ‘Visions’…”

“The way they classify ‘Anomalies’ and ‘Visions’? You’ve already learned that?” Duncan raised his eyebrows, and his words still carried a bit of mental guidance.

He had cared about this ever since he started listening. Now he was even more sure that, in the eyes of ordinary people in this world, the unnatural things were strictly divided. Some things were called “Anomalies” and even had numbers, but other things… seemed to be called “Visions” separately, instead of being lumped together with all the rest as “Anomalies” like he had first thought.

Back on the Vanished, he had never heard any detailed knowledge about this from Goathead. Now the things Nina was learning at school could finally make up for this gap in his basic understanding.

Nina nodded. She thought back to what she had heard in class and said: “The simplest way Old Mr. Morris taught us to tell the difference between Anomalies and Visions is by scale.

“Usually, Anomalies are smaller in scale. They are often limited to a single object, a single animal, or even a single ‘person’.

“Most Anomalies can be moved by people, and their range of influence is limited. Many Anomalies only affect a single target at any one time. If you know the right methods, most Anomalies can also be safely sealed or isolated. Some of the less harmful Anomalies can even be ‘used’ like tools through special methods.

“Visions are much larger in scale than Anomalies. The smallest Vision is as big as a whole house. Larger ones can cover an entire city?state, or even more… so large it is hard to imagine.

“A good number of Visions cannot be moved by human hands at all. They are either fixed in one place, or they move according to their own will. Their ability to affect things also far surpasses that of Anomalies. Most of the time, a Vision can affect an unlimited number of targets within the area where it works, so much so that it is almost the same as a ‘natural phenomenon’. That is why they are called ‘Visions’.

“Unlike Anomalies, almost all Visions cannot be sealed or controlled. They exist in the world like natural phenomena, working without any outside interference, and they naturally affect every target within their range that meets the conditions. Because most Visions are dangerous, all people can do is stay away from these dangerous Visions, or use special methods to keep themselves from becoming targets inside a Vision’s active range…

“Luckily, the most dangerous Visions usually do not move. The pioneers helped us find out where those dangers are, so we can safely keep our distance from them…”

Nina spoke very seriously. Then she suddenly seemed to remember something and quickly added: “Oh, right. Old Mr. Morris also especially reminded us that these rules and traits are only ‘usually valid’. Anomalies and Visions are things that go against common sense, so no matter how people sum up their experience, there will always be Anomalies or Visions that do not fit the definitions and suddenly appear. Sometimes an Anomaly and a Vision can even switch places, and there are cases where Visions can be interfered with or destroyed by human hands.

“For example, in the year 1830 of the New City?State Calendar, there was an Anomaly in the city?state of Lunsa called ‘Mycelium’ that entered a runaway state. The local Church guardians paid a heavy price to banish that runaway?state Anomaly to a nearby island. In 1835, that island was reclassified and promoted to a Vision and became what was later known as Fungal Isle—but in 1844, the great Saint Paladin gave his life to contain Fungal Isle inside his own ash urn. The Vision ‘Fungal Isle’ was struck from the rolls that same year. It turned back into an ‘Anomaly’ and was renamed the ‘Paladin’s Mushroom Jar’. It is now sealed in the sacred relic vault under the great Cathedral of Lunsa city?state…”

Duncan listened with full attention to everything Nina said. His mind worked quickly, while his calm expression hid the waves in his heart.

In this short breakfast alone, the information he gathered had already surpassed everything he had learned in all those days on the Vanished.

Building contact with the land and setting up an outpost in a city?state on the surface had indeed been the right idea. Civilized society was where most of the world’s information was gathered.

He looked without thinking at the girl still talking in front of him and felt a lot of emotion.

A normal civilization that had developed to the industrial stage would surely try every way it could to compress and collect the basic knowledge needed to run society into its education system. A child living inside that system might find it hard to notice what a treasure those textbooks they saw every day really were.

They were knowledge that countless people had built up over countless years, then sorted and organized again and again into forms that were easiest to learn. Those books were the most delicate “compressed rations” of knowledge in the world, meant to turn a blank sheet of a person into a working part of society with the smallest possible cost of time and effort.

Even Nina, who normally loved to study, could not feel this. Only an “outsider” like Duncan could see how precious this knowledge was, and how easy it was to absorb.

Nina did not notice what Duncan was thinking. She only remembered what her respected history teacher had said in class—

“…So at the end of the last class, Old Mr. Morris said one more thing to us. He said that people had summed up countless rules while dealing with ‘Anomalies’ and ‘Visions’, but only one rule was truly always valid. That rule is: ‘No matter how many rules we sum up, there will always be Anomalies or Visions in this world that do not follow them.’

“Scholars also call this rule the ‘Eternal Clause Zero’. By default, it is placed at the very beginning of all books and papers in the related fields. Based on it, people came up with the famous ‘Perpetual Miscalibration Law of Anomalies and Visions’. Up to this day, that law has never been broken…”