Chapter 482

Chapter 482: The Room.

In the dark Deep Sea, a ball of ghost-green flame suddenly shot past like a meteor. The crushing weight and stillness of hundreds of millions of tons of seawater seemed not to exist at all. They did not slow that “meteor” in the slightest.

Ai streaked across the black floating island of the Deep Sea at lightning speed. She finally stopped over the island’s central area and drew her body together again out of the flames.

Duncan stepped out of the fire and floated in the water. He turned his head to look at the Pigeon Spirit flapping back and forth beside him.

Ai flew over and landed on her Master’s shoulder. She tilted her head in curiosity and asked: “What are you staring at?”

Duncan did not answer. He only lifted his arm and gently rubbed the pigeon’s head. Then he turned around and looked toward the huge “pillar” at the center of the island.

Now he stood before it. The shocking giant column rose in his view, stretching up from the mountaintop at the center of the Deep Sea floating island. It pointed almost straight toward the sky. It seemed not only to pierce the whole island, but to pierce the endless dark Deep Sea itself, reaching all the way up toward Frostholm, up into the world above the sea that bathed in sunlight.

But it did not truly extend without end. When he got close enough, Duncan finally saw more details, and he noticed that the upper half of this “pillar” came to an abrupt stop in the water.

The break was very, very high above. There seemed to be a sudden, ugly fracture there.

But before he examined that break, Duncan first moved carefully toward the middle part of the pillar and studied the shape of its “outer skin”.

It was neat and dense. Faint complex, regular patterns could be seen on it, along with evenly spaced raised structures. This pillar, which looked like an enormous tentacle, showed an orderly, “tidy” feeling in its details. It even looked… like some kind of industrial product.

Duncan hesitated for a moment, then carefully reached his hand toward the pillar. This shell of a body had no formed hands or feet, but as he made the motion to touch the “pillar”, the end of his arm suddenly swelled and writhed. In almost the blink of an eye, it split and shaped itself into the structure of a hand.

Was this a second shaping based on some “original template”, triggered on its own by a special stimulus?

Duncan remembered the feeling from before, when the face of this body had split to form eyes. He guessed at it in his mind. At the same time, he felt his newly formed fingers touch the pillar’s pitch-black surface.

A rough, cold feeling came from his fingertips, like rubbing crude cast iron, yet it also seemed to have a certain softness.

Duncan leaned closer and examined the pillar’s surface more carefully.

Deep under that dull gray-black skin, he could faintly see pale blue lines, like veins buried deep under flesh.

Duncan’s heart stirred. He at once thought of that piece of “flesh” sample he had taken from Captain Cristo Barbelli’s mouth deep inside the Obsidian.

The textures of the two looked very similar. Was this pillar standing in the Deep Sea really a limb of the Abyssal Lord stretching down into the Mortal Realm?

With a strange feeling inside, Duncan backed away a little and slowly swept his gaze over the giant pillar.

To find the wound Captain Cristo had left on a structure this huge was of course impossible for any mortal, but that did not stop a fresh wave of respect for the captain from rising in Duncan’s heart.

A few minutes later, Duncan started to swim upward along the pillar. His target was that “break”.

After a long time, he finally reached the place where the break lay, and what he saw there was almost what he had imagined.

The pillar did end abruptly here, as if some jagged sharp teeth had bitten it off. The edge of the break was uneven and ridged.

Inside the break, the gray-black inner wall sank in on itself, like a strange, eerie volcanic crater.

Duncan floated near the “break” and roughly estimated the pillar’s scale from what he saw. He soon confirmed one thing—

If the “Great Hollow” in the Boiling Gold mine really was the result of a similar “pillar” or “tentacle” corruption, then the tentacle that had pierced into the city-state was far smaller than the pillar before his eyes. Its size might have been only one fifth of this one, or even less.

Was it because the tentacle that pierced the city-state was only a “projection of power” from this main body in the Deep Sea? Or was the tentacle in the Great Hollow still in its early growth and meant to keep growing?

If the defense of Frostholm had failed, if he had not managed to destroy Frostholm’s mirror world in the end, and if the “pillar” in the Great Hollow deep under the Boiling Gold mine had kept growing out of control… would it have grown until it tore through the mine, burst through the mountain above, and become a “giant pillar” just like the one before his eyes now, as if it ran through a whole floating island?

Was this what those mad Annihilators claimed and longed for—to “recreate in the Mortal Realm the grand Blueprint of the Lord’s creation”?

These frightening guesses flashed through Duncan’s mind for a moment. Then a tiny glimmer of light suddenly shot past the edge of his vision and cut off his thoughts.

He snapped his head toward the place where that glimmer had appeared.

It was at the center of the “break”, at the deepest point of that sunken “crater”.

He hardly hesitated. He swam toward that spot at once.

He passed over the jagged broken “cliffs” at the pillar’s edge and over the dark matter that sank toward the center. In this silent Deep Sea, far from the civilized world, that sudden flash of light became the only target in Duncan’s eyes. He swam as fast as he could and reached the area near the center of the pillar’s break.

Yet when he arrived, the flash had already vanished.

Only empty darkness remained here. The “ground” inside the pillar’s break lay as cold and still as rock.

Duncan floated in the water, frowning as he looked across that darkness. The empty place felt like a solid, regretful ellipsis, hiding its secrets once more deep behind the Veil.

But soon, he noticed something wrong in what he saw.

Below him, at the center of the pillar’s break, the “ground” had a faintly strange texture. It looked somewhat… “blurred”.

Yes, blurred, as if it was not solid matter at all, but truly a layer of Veil between real and unreal.

Duncan hesitated for a few seconds, then carefully moved closer to that strangely textured “ground”. But before he reached out to touch it, he first gathered a tiny flame at his fingertip and cast it into that blurred “Veil”.

When in doubt, let the spirit flame clear the way. Being extra careful never hurt.

The eerie green spirit form fire dropped onto the black “ground” in almost an instant. At first it sank in and vanished, like water seeping into sand. Right after, faint threads of green flame started to spread through the darkness. In almost the blink of an eye, the entire “ground” was burning fiercely!

As the flames burned, Duncan suddenly felt that some subtle “connection” was forming.

But the link did not point to the huge pillar beneath him, the one that seemed to be an Elder God’s tentacle. It pointed instead toward a presence that felt… vaguely familiar.

In the next second, he saw the ground below change quickly as the flames spread. It slowly turned into something like a mirror surface, and that mirror-like layer rippled faintly in the firelight, like a smooth, thick liquid!

Duncan’s heart stirred. He followed the feeling that came from the flames and moved closer to the rippling, mirror-like “liquid surface”, then reached out and touched it with a finger.

Boom!

In the unreal space, it felt as if a huge crash exploded inside his mind. Frozen time suddenly roared into motion. A heavy Veil tore open all at once. A wall at the edge of the Mortal Realm collapsed with a thunderous rumble. Duncan felt himself cross some boundary in an instant. Then the “world” before his eyes began to fill with warm light.

The feeling of being wrapped in cold, heavy seawater vanished at once. Solid ground under his feet replaced the empty, anchorless floating from a second earlier. The warm light before his eyes also grew softer. As his vision slowly adjusted, Duncan finally saw his surroundings, and he stared in stunned shock.

He was standing in a splendid, bright room.

Light poured from the chandelier on the ceiling, shining over many fine and tasteful furnishings. Shelves and metal statues in a courtly style glowed softly in the light. A magnificent large bed stood in the center of the room, wrapped in semi-transparent curtains, and it seemed that someone was sleeping in their depths.

Duncan stared at the scene before him in disbelief. Then he suddenly turned his head and looked behind him.

That seemed to be the direction he had come from.

He saw a mass of twisted, chaotic darkness.

The room seemed to vanish into thin air before that boundary. Beyond the broken, jagged walls and floor was a chaotic realm like a void. Twisted shadows and dim streams of light rose and flowed in that nothingness. It seemed full of Truth and mysteries enough to drive any mortal mad, yet it also seemed like a hollow with no meaning at all.

A word suddenly flowed into his mind—

Subspace.

Duncan felt his heart—if this body even had a heart—skip a beat. He had never imagined a scene like this. He stood in a shattered room, and just one step away lay Subspace with its chaotic lights and shadows. Those hazy, chaotic lights and shadows seemed to give a silent roar, using wild, wordless speech to pour into him incomprehensible knowledge and “Truth”.

Duncan raised his hand and carefully reached toward the darkness beyond the room’s edge.

His fingers met a hard, cold surface.

An invisible barrier stood between him and Subspace.

A voice suddenly spoke from behind him: “You cannot go through. You have not truly opened that door yet.”

Duncan’s heart lurched, and he whipped around.

The curtains around the splendid bed had already been drawn aside. The person who had been asleep on the bed had woken at some unknown time and was quietly watching him.

Silver-white long hair fell over her shoulders, and violet eyes shone like gems.

“Alice?”