Chapter 463

Chapter 463: The Hybrid.

Duncan strolled to the edge of the White Oak’s deck and leaned out to look at the sea below.

At this moment, both the White Oak and the Vanished had withdrawn from Spirit Realm state. On the calm, blue normal sea, the water around the White Oak was clear as a mirror. The Black Oak, shrouded in fog and darkness, was reflected there like a shadow. In the dim blur of that ship’s silhouette, faint lights seemed to glow.

After a long time, Duncan pulled his gaze back from the sea and spoke softly with a sigh: “An interesting phenomenon. Lawrence, you went through an incredible adventure.”

“It really was… incredible,” Lawrence answered respectfully and carefully from the side. “I’ve made a living on this sea for decades and seen many unbelievable things. But what happened at Frostholm still went far beyond all of that. No matter what though, I brought Martha back. That makes every risk worth it.”

“Your wife, Martha—what state is she in now? And how exactly are these two ships you each control connected to one another?”

“She and her Black Oak are now like the shadow of the White Oak,” Lawrence answered honestly. “As you can see, she is on that reflected ship. But when needed, the Black Oak can also enter the Mortal Realm as a phantom and sail alongside the White Oak, or we can perform a light?and?shadow Inversion between the two ships. In that state, we can sail deep into the Spirit Realm and avoid obstacles in the Mortal Realm. We did that once when we crossed the war zone around Frostholm. It worked very well.”

“Your wife told you all this? I mean these… techniques.”

“Yes.” Lawrence nodded. “Martha wandered in the mirror world spaces under the sea outside Frostholm for more than ten years. She knows many things. During our last operations, she basically served as our guide.”

Duncan said nothing for a while and just watched the reflection below. After a long time, he suddenly broke the silence: “May I speak with her alone?”

Lawrence was taken aback. Surprise flickered across his face, followed at once by tension and hesitation: “This… may I ask what you…”

“Relax. I simply need to understand each of my subordinates. The Black Oak is indeed strange, but on this sea no ship is more bizarre than the Vanished. I am very tolerant in this area—as long as the Black Oak has no secrets from me.”

Only then did Lawrence breathe a little easier. Though still hesitant, he nodded: “All right. I’ll make arrangements and let Martha know.”

Duncan gave a slight nod, then turned his head to look a short distance away.

Alice and Sailor were squatting on the deck over there. The two of them were cheerfully poking at a little bug they had caught from who knew where with small sticks. As they poked, they argued heatedly over whether the bug had a soul or not—

Alice thought it did not, because she could not see any strings on the bug. Sailor insisted that it did, because he had heard that Bartok’s garden also had bugs. He even believed there were tiny Gatekeepers the size of bugs whose special job every summer was to carry the souls of dead mosquitoes from the mortal world to the place of rest, so they could bite people who were buried in June and July…

The two of them kept bluffing each other into stunned silence.

The scene looked like two complete fools at play.

Just watching them for too long made your brain feel like it was under corruption.

Duncan quietly watched the undisturbed scene on the deck. Lawrence watched in silence beside him as well. After a long time, Duncan shook his head: “Let them play.”

“I think so too. It’s better than him hanging from the flagpole and wailing like a ghost,” Lawrence said.

…

Soon, Lawrence had his crew prepare a quiet room on the White Oak and set up a large mirror inside.

After all unrelated people left, Duncan turned around and fixed his gaze quietly on the man?tall mirror.

“I want to talk to you.” He spoke to the mirror.

The next second, the surface turned pitch black, as if thick inky liquid had suddenly flooded across it. In the depths of that darkness, a mass of swelling and shrinking Shadows slowly took shape.

A lady in a white shirt, brown vest, and long trousers stepped out of the swelling Shadows.

“Lawrence told me. You wish to speak with me alone,” the lady said as she came to the front of the mirror, answering Duncan’s gaze calmly. “It seems… you noticed.”

“Too many impurities. The overlapping shadows hide the details that do not belong to the Black Oak, but that isn’t enough to fool my flames,” Duncan said slowly. He reached out, pulled a chair over, and sat down, looking at the figure in the mirror—and at the vast darkness behind her, tangled and intricate like some illusory Veil. “How much of you is ‘Martha’?”

“…Less than one part in a thousand.”

“One in a thousand. A very small number,” Duncan said, his gaze fixed on her. The vast, chaotic “hybrid” behind her met that gaze without flinching. “Even so, you still call yourself Martha. And it looks like… you truly identify with that name.”

“Because ‘Martha’ is the only complete personality among them,” the “female adventurer” in the mirror answered. “Without a personality to support them, memories are pale pages. Flipping through them is not enough to form a ‘self’. The vast, muddled memories have been reassembled blindly and chaotically countless times. In the end, I judged that ‘Martha’ was the only ‘representative’ that could manage all of this. I need to become Martha. Martha needs to exist.”

“So you are a hybrid. And what you’ve mixed together is far more than you told Lawrence. A considerable part of the minds that fell into that sea in the past fifty years have flowed into your ‘body’. Or to put it another way… you devoured those minds?”

“Devoured… that is a very aggressive word, but I don’t see it that way. I have never devoured anything, and I am not interested in souls. It is the great power deep in that mirror world space that devours everything. The ‘memories’ that make me up are only the scraps left after that power crushed them. Tiny tributaries flow together, like motes of dust gathering into a clump. I did not exist before those fragments. Those fragments gathered to form me—Martha—only a Ghost who woke up from the shards and belatedly took on the role of collector of the dead.”

“Scraps left after being crushed…” Duncan frowned. “Why was Martha not crushed?”

“Because Lawrence came to these waters,” the female adventurer in the mirror said, a faint smile on her face. “He is under your blessing. So Martha is under your blessing too.”

Duncan did not reply. He fell into a long silence. After quite a while, he broke it, thoughtful: “The world in the mirror is discontinuous…”

“Yes. The world in the mirror is discontinuous. Space is not continuous, and time is not continuous either. The ending is born before the beginning. You created Martha, and now Martha is answering your questions.”

Duncan let out a slow breath.

“A vast data hybrid… that explains why you know so much,” he said, bringing the topic back. “It is not only because you wandered that mirror world space long enough, but because you hold enough ‘memories’ inside you. So back to the first question. Is less than one thousandth of ‘Martha’ really enough to support a stable personality and let you keep your current sense of self forever? Will there come a day when this ‘collector’ personality is drowned in that ocean of memories? Will you forget your own name and become a chaotic, vast, dangerous Restless Soul?”

The adventurer lifted her eyes. Behind her calm expression, she seemed to gather great courage: “Like you once were?”

“No. I went farther than you did. Subspace is far deeper and darker than the mirror world world. So I was also more dangerous back then than you are now,” Duncan said. He did not mind her bold words and kept his usual calm tone. “That is why I understand very well how much harm a runaway state Restless Soul can cause—even if this Restless Soul is a bit ‘safer’ than I was.”

The adventurer in the mirror fell silent for a moment.

After a long time, she suddenly spoke: “Do you think I can be counted as ‘Martha’ now?”

Duncan thought for several seconds.

To this vast, tangled hybrid, Martha was only one thousandth of it. But to the personality that called itself “Martha”, everything within the hybrid was her one hundred percent.

Who this huge hybrid really was and what state its future personality would settle into seemed completely “undecided”. There was a chance it would go into a runaway state, but its current personality and sense of self were also clearly real.

Duncan hesitated for a moment. As that hesitation rose, a scene that felt half real and half dreamlike suddenly surfaced in his mind—

The sea breeze was gentle, and the waves were calm.

He stood on the water. Blue waves spread out under his feet.

Fish leaped from the sea. In the bright sunlight, the fish swam through the air around him, circling at ease.

He lowered his head and looked down at his feet.

The rippling surface looked clear and transparent, yet its depths seemed veiled in mist, blurred and impossible to see through.

New things leaped from the water and swam around him.

They were fish.

Duncan woke with a start and looked at the mirror before him.

The Shadows in the mirror swelled and writhed as if waiting for an answer.

“…Lady Martha,” Duncan finally broke the silence after a long time. “Welcome to the Vanisheds Fleet.”

The formless darkness full of confusion and chaos, that mass without any clear outline, suddenly contracted. It once again became the female adventurer in a white shirt, brown vest, and long trousers.

The tangled Shadows behind her had calmed.

At the same time, on the White Oak’s deck, Lawrence, who had been acting like a temporary guardian while he watched Doll Alice and the mummified corpse Sailor poke at the bug, also looked down at his own body in confusion.

Those uncontrolled green flames that kept rising and spreading were rapidly drawing back. The body that had been stuck in Ghost form for three days straight was quickly recovering. In his senses, the Ghost fire that had been flaring up now and then for no reason seemed, for the first time, to truly become calm and turn into a part of his body he could control.

It was as if some “source of stimulus” that kept passively triggering his spirit form flames had suddenly vanished.

“…Under control?”

Lawrence blinked and muttered to himself in puzzlement.