Chapter 485

Chapter 485: Alice’s Secret.

The room fell into silence.

This heavy silence lasted for an unknown length of time before Duncan suddenly broke it: “All beings in the world are Elder Gods’ spawn—even the most fanatical Annihilators have probably never spoken such a blasphemous conclusion.”

“Hearing the word ‘blasphemous’ from your mouth is truly unbelievable,” Ray Nora said, half smiling as her gaze met Duncan’s eyes. “Yet this really is the ultimate Truth I learned in that long nightmare. Just as in that scene you saw in The Deep Sea, the ‘Creation Doctrine’ preached by Annihilators is not entirely false. Perhaps they misunderstood it, but at least one thing is fact… Our world was created by the Elder Gods according to some grand ‘blueprint,’ and in that act of creation, Their flesh became the foundation of all things.”

Duncan stayed silent for a few seconds before speaking slowly, almost to himself: “The Abyssal Lord used Its own being as raw material and, following the ‘blueprint’ in The Deep Sea, shaped all things above the sea. Its ‘flesh’ naturally exists inside all things. Because of some ‘error,’ the ‘flesh’ that had already been shaped into worldly things became active. So the Elder Gods awoke from mortal flesh and from the ‘blueprints’ of city-states—that is the truth behind the Frostholm crisis?”

Ray Nora nodded slowly, her voice soft: “Copying and creating are the Abyssal Lord’s divine authority. It can evolve all things out of Its own being, so It took on the work of the Genesis Protocol. But clearly, after such a long time, the original blueprint has started to fail. Or perhaps the ‘Creator’ that serves as the source went wrong. It began to wake from Its creations—waking again and again in the form of ‘faulty replicas.’ Frostholm was the first, but it will not be the last…”

Even with Duncan’s self-control, hearing these shocking and dreadful words made it hard to hold back the storm in his heart. The Elder Gods would gradually awaken from all living beings and even from all things in the world. In terms of sheer eerie horror, this was even more terrifying than that Black Sun hanging over the city-state of Pland!

“You learned all this in your nightmares, in communication with… ‘It’?” Duncan asked. He had to put in real effort to steady the wild surge in his thoughts. Forcing himself to keep calm, he turned his head toward that dark Deep Sea at the end of the room, looking at the huge “pillar” that stood quietly in the darkness.

“As an incomplete replica, It cannot tell me anything directly, but I can learn many things from It,” Ray Nora said. “I know what you want to say—human minds are weak. Even when we face the Truth, our limited senses and thoughts cannot fully and accurately grasp what we see. So I do not dare claim that what I say is one hundred percent ‘real.’ It is only what I grasped through my own senses and understanding, from an Elder God’s broken ‘thoughts’… for your reference only.”

Duncan did not answer at once. He fell into long thought. After an unknown time, he suddenly turned back: “‘Alice’—what exactly is she? Is she the body you planned to use for your resurrection?”

“‘Alice’?” Ray Nora frowned slightly when she heard the name. The confusion in her eyes did not look fake. “Who is Alice?”

“…So you do not know that name. I thought her awareness came from you,” Duncan said. He carefully checked the small changes in Ray Nora’s expression before drawing back his searching gaze. “She is a doll who looks exactly like you. Many years ago, after you were… ‘executed,’ the people of Frostholm salvaged a container from the Frost Sea. Alice was sleeping inside it. She was once called Anomaly 099, but now she is a member of my crew.”

Ray Nora listened quietly to Duncan’s description. Her expression grew more and more thoughtful. After a long time, she suddenly showed a small smile: “Ah, so that is how it is…”

“So that is how it is?” Duncan caught that word at once. “What do you mean?”

“I have always been dreaming, all kinds of dreams. It is like drifting up and down on a sea shrouded in thick fog. Most of the time, I am wrapped in cold and darkness, falling asleep with those broken whispers. I can hardly tell whether the ‘me’ in the dream is the soul of a human or a dazed Elder God replicant in The Deep Sea. But sometimes… dry land appears in my dreams, and a swaying cabin, and some nervous strangers whispering to each other…”

As she spoke, she slowly lifted her head and looked at Duncan with a smile.

“In recent times, the second kind of dream has clearly appeared more often. The whispering strangers in the dream turned into many… strange but amusing items. They played and bickered with me. And there was always a trustworthy gaze watching from the edge of the dream… You care a great deal about that doll who calls herself ‘Alice,’ do you not?”

“There are not many people she can trust in this world. There are not many people I trust in this world either,” Duncan said. He looked very seriously at the ‘queen of Frostholm’ in front of him and did not relax just because of her gentle smile. “This runaway state sea has ‘copied’ many things—sunken ships, drowned sailors. But the ‘executed queen’ is the most special. She is a doll with a self… Yet from your attitude, you did not know about this?”

Ray Nora seemed not to notice the stern seriousness in Duncan’s eyes. She only frowned a little, as if thinking hard. Slowly, a look of realization appeared. She closed her eyes as if feeling for something, then opened them again and looked at Duncan with a slightly odd expression: “That doll calls herself ‘Alice,’ does she?”

Duncan frowned: “Yes. Is there a problem?”

“Then… what if I say that doll is not actually my ‘replica’?” Ray Nora said seriously. “Or rather, not entirely my replica?”

“…What do you mean by that?”

“Is it possible…” Ray Nora paused, trying to keep serious, though her expression stayed awkward. “The Alice guillotine—the point is not ‘Alice.’ It is ‘guillotine’…”

“…?” Duncan stared.

“I do not really want to recall this,” Ray Nora said as she reached up and rubbed the back of her neck with a strange look on her face. “Do you know that when the rebels executed me, they used a device called the ‘Alice guillotine’…”

A light finally flashed through Duncan’s mind. He understood what the ‘queen of Frostholm’ meant.

But he almost wished he did not.

“You mean you suspect ‘Alice’ was actually copied by this runaway state sea from that ‘guillotine,’ not from your body…”

Duncan spoke without thinking, but stopped halfway, muttering to himself in confusion: “But that cannot be right. She looks exactly like you…”

“Faulty copying, Captain,” Ray Nora said. She clearly already had an answer. She shook her head and looked toward the dark Deep Sea at the end of the room. “A damaged, faulty Elder God replicant caused this runaway state sea. In such a runaway state sea, faulty copying is the norm. When a decapitated queen and a guillotine sank into The Deep Sea together, and because of my earlier arrangements fell exactly into the ‘perception’ range of the Elder God’s tentacle, it may have triggered some… strange changes. Mixing and recombining, copying and making whole, and a little… processing from the mystic field.”

She stopped there and looked at the Elder God’s tentacle standing in the darkness, her gaze complicated.

“Clearly, It could not tell the difference…”

The room fell into silence again.

But this silence was completely different from before.

After this suffocating quiet lasted for several minutes, Duncan finally broke it with a sigh: “So in a sense, It was raising a placenta…”

Ray Nora opened her mouth. After a few seconds of stunned silence, she managed: “An unprecedented but perfectly fitting metaphor. As expected of you…”

Duncan let out a helpless sigh. What else could he say? In this dark, boundless Deep Sea, the way things developed had already gone beyond everyone’s expectations. The Elder Gods’ madness and unspeakable nature showed themselves in every detail. To use a less fitting metaphor—in choosing between saving the mother or the child, the Elder Gods chose to save the placenta…

But at least he had understood one thing—

Why did that silly doll think her name was “Alice”?

Because she really was the Alice guillotine.

Since coming to this world, Duncan had seen more strange and twisted things than he could count. Yet even among all those, this was definitely the most twisted of all.

“Look on the bright side. At least there is one thing you do not need to worry about,” Ray Nora said, noticing Duncan’s dark mood and trying to comfort him. “Alice is not a body I prepared for my resurrection. In fact, from the very beginning, I never planned any so-called ‘resurrection.’”

Listening to the queen of Frostholm’s words, Duncan turned to look at her again. He had to work hard to adjust his mood, forcing away the lingering sense of wrongness in his heart and pulling the topic back on track: “Then… what about that key you mentioned at the start? What about the keyhole on Alice’s back? Were none of those your arrangements?”

“I do not know what ‘keyhole’ you are talking about. But if the key you mean is a brass winding key, then yes, I did leave it to the city’s governor. It is also the item I just mentioned that is needed to enter this room in the normal way,” Ray Nora said openly. Then she changed the subject: “But I am not the key’s creator, nor its first owner.”

Duncan froze for a moment. His eyes changed: “…You were not the key’s first owner? Then where did you get it?”

“It was a gift from a friend,” Ray Nora said calmly. “An elderly man who was knowledgeable and kind.”