Chapter 480

Chapter 480: Blueprint

As the submersible’s lights swept around, all the shapes drifting in the dark water came into Duncan’s view—people, countless people, floating in the sea.

However, as Duncan looked more closely, he noticed something strange about these bodies.

They had no facial features, not even clearly defined hands and feet, and no clothes at all—just one shape after another with a rough human outline. Their surfaces had a coarse texture and a pitch?black color.

They looked like dolls crudely pinched out of black mud, like Rough Husks.

Duncan described the details he saw to Agatha.

“Only an outline?” Agatha sounded both shocked and unsure. “But in my eyes… they shine with the same Spiritual Insight glow as living people in the city?states…”

Duncan said nothing. He only frowned slightly and carefully guided the submersible toward one of the “human shapes” floating not far outside the porthole.

As the submersible’s movement stirred the water, it disturbed the calm of the Deep Sea. The pitch?black Humanoid Husk slowly rolled in the water, turning at an angle. Its smooth, spherical “head” faced the porthole first, followed by its short, bare arms, which looked as if they had never been finished.

The mechanical arm slowly reached out. The hook at its tip caught onto the figure’s torso and gently prodded it.

It gave no reaction at all, showing no sign of being “alive”.

Duncan lifted his head again and looked out through the porthole at the distant, silently floating Humanoid Husks. In the beam of light they stretched farther and farther away until they finally vanished into the darkness of the Deep Sea.

How many were there here? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Or even tens of millions?

Suddenly a memory surfaced. Duncan recalled one detail he had heard when he once discussed the Abyssal Trench Project with Tyrian—the No. 3 submersible had shot crazily upward during its final Deep Dive, and the explorer who had gone mad kept screaming one sentence after they returned to the sunlight above:

“We all died down there!”

Duncan furrowed his brow little by little and looked gravely at the countless bodies drifting silently outside the porthole—was this what that explorer had seen before he lost his mind?

Beside him, Agatha suddenly broke the silence. Her tone turned serious: “This makes me think of those replicas that infiltrated the city?states before.”

“I thought of that too,” Duncan nodded slightly, “but they are not quite the same. Those replicas might show all kinds of inhuman traits, but at least they have faces, hands, feet, and other details. They also try to imitate humans, wearing normal clothes. These Humanoid Husks, though, only have the most basic outline. If anything… they look more like Rough Husks, even cruder than the replicas.”

“Some kind of unfinished product?” Agatha suddenly thought of something. “Were those replicas ‘manufactured’ out of these Rough Husks as a base?”

“Hard to say,” Duncan replied, his tone uncertain. “These things might have been drifting in the Deep Sea for many, many years. At the very least, they were already here when the Abyssal Trench Project began. Also, the power that invaded the city?states used the properties of the mirror world to intrude into the Mortal Realm, while these here are ‘physical’ bodies in the Deep Sea. The two are connected, but they shouldn’t be in a simple unfinished?versus?finished relationship.”

Agatha listened, deep in thought. For some reason, she suddenly recalled something a cultist had said when she confronted them before—

“There were never any replicas to begin with. Or rather… we are all replicas…”

Almost at the same time, Duncan seemed to think of something as well. His gaze passed over the floating bodies and turned toward the unknown Deep Sea below. Then he reached for the control lever.

Deep in the machinery bay, some device let out a dying growl and wail. The hull creaked under the unbearable strain. As the sound of water flooding in rose, the submersible began to descend again.

As those almost terrifying noises echoed around them, Agatha could not help looking at Duncan: “Captain, can this thing still hold together?”

Duncan’s gaze swept over the instruments on the control panel. At the same time he sensed the faint feedback from the fire of his spirit form. His hand, pulling the dive lever, did not relax.

“It can still hold,” he said in a low voice. “We should be almost there.”

“Almost there?” Agatha froze. “You know what’s down below?”

Duncan did not answer. He just kept carefully guiding the submersible downward, making tiny adjustments to the thrusters. The hull, pushed to its limits, let out bone?chilling creaks almost every second. Even the edges where the portholes joined the hull began to groan and crack, as if the fragile balance might break at any moment and the entire submersible would crumple into a wad of metal under the pressure of the sea.

Yet it kept diving, moving along that narrow knife?edge between collapse and balance, sinking toward the deepest darkness.

But the hull and machinery were not the only sources of dreadful sound. There was another noise even more chilling—the steady, real thuds striking the outside of the hull:

“Bang.” “Bang.” “Bang”…

The Humanoid Husks, those Rough Husks of black mud, bumped against the hull from time to time. The dull thuds sounded especially horrifying, like stones knocking against a skull.

Even Agatha could not help tightening her grip on the handrail in front of her.

She could feel the entire submersible tilting forward. The angle had reached the point where it was hard to stand without holding on.

Then she suddenly “saw” something appear outside the porthole.

A stretch of rolling, chaotic outline that seemed endless appeared at the edge of the searchlight beam, near the lower rim of the porthole.

It looked… almost like a stretch of ground.

“The seabed?” Agatha cried out in shock. “I see something… is that the seabed?”

Duncan stared silently out of the porthole with his gaze. He looked at the uneven “ground” that had suddenly appeared in the black Deep Sea, at its jagged, twisting “coastline” and the hazy structures farther away that he could not see clearly. Only after a long time did he shake his head slightly: “Not the seabed. We are still far from what you would call the ‘seabed’—that is a piece of land floating in the water.”

Agatha sounded puzzled: “A piece of land floating in the water?”

“…Another Frostholm Island,” Duncan answered softly. “We can only see a short stretch of coastline, but I know this terrain very well. That is the main island of Frostholm—Frostholm in its original form, without the city?state, without the harbor, without any buildings.”

Agatha’s body clearly trembled a little.

Duncan lifted his head and looked at the water around and above that “Frostholm Island”.

Countless Humanoid Husks floated around that “Deep Sea floating island”, like a swarm of bees around a hive.

And the scene was sealed in the dark, icy depths of the Deep Sea like amber, time frozen as if someone had pressed pause, quietly holding an ancient moment in place.

Agatha’s voice sounded beside him: “This place… what exactly is it…”

“…The original Blueprint,” Duncan said quietly.

In the third Long Night, the Crawling King bestowed the Blueprint upon the Collective and began the Genesis Protocol. To avoid repeating the fate of the King of Dreams and the pale giants, He divided that Blueprint, removed the kingdoms from the mortal world, and turned those kingdoms into twelve hundred cities…

After the third Long Night, civilization survived, and the Deep Sea era began. Everything in the Deep Sea era was built upon this “twelve?hundred?city” Blueprint of the Crawling King.

A portion of what was recorded in that Blasphemous Tome had just been confirmed.

But could there be another possibility?

Duncan’s thoughts churned, and he fell silent for a moment. Beside him, Agatha finally reacted. Once she understood what “original Blueprint” meant, she spoke in disbelief: “You mean… Frostholm as it is now, and the people of Frostholm, and even all the city?states and mortals in this world… were all manufactured based on these ‘things’ in the Deep Sea…”

“It’s one possibility,” Duncan said, shaking his head slightly, his voice low. “In the Annihilators’ heretical teachings, there is a record of the Abyssal Lord’s Work of Creation. Of course that is heresy. But we cannot deny that the ancient texts in their hands might still reveal part of the true history.”

Agatha opened her mouth but could not say a word.

From the moment she dove into the Deep Sea, the world as she knew it seemed to be undergoing an earth?shaking reshaping. Too many doubts, too many shaken beliefs made even a Gatekeeper with a steadfast mind struggle to sort out her thoughts.

The original island “templates” floating in the Deep Sea, the countless human?shaped Rough Husks… if what the Annihilators said about the Abyssal Lord creating the world was true, then… would that not mean all living beings in the mortal world were essentially creations of the Abyssal Lord?

Even after surviving the mirror world crisis in Frostholm and reaffirming her faith and conviction through that great trial, Agatha still found it hard to accept such a reality?shattering “possibility”.

But she did not blindly deny everything she saw in the face of such huge contradictions and doubts.

From the moment she decided to undertake this Deep Dive, she had prepared herself mentally—

In the Deep Sea, anything was possible.

“Are we… going to get closer?” She turned her head and spoke to Duncan in as steady a tone as she could manage.

But Duncan did not touch the controls again.

His gaze swept over the many instruments on the console.

His senses spread throughout the submersible.

“…We’ve already reached the limit,” he said. “The submersible’s hull can’t hold.”

“…We were just a little short,” Agatha said, obviously full of regret. “We were about to reach that floating island…”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s only the submersible that can’t hold,” Duncan shook his head slightly and looked out the porthole. “There is something here that can.”

Agatha turned her head in confusion.

But Duncan kept quietly using his gaze to look outside, staring at those shapes drifting in the light… the Humanoid Husks.

“I remember you said just now that in your eyes, these Humanoid Husks, like Rough Husks, shine with a Spiritual Insight glow like living people.”

Outside the porthole, one of the roughly shaped Humanoid Husks slowly turned its head toward Agatha.