Chapter 487

Chapter 487: Setting Fire to the Deep Sea

Ray Nora’s tone was calm and detached, as if many years ago she had already planned every scene of her own End. Whether it was being trapped in a nightmare forever or suffering eternal exile, it was just one of the steps that had always been part of her planned future.

Just as Duncan had thought, the Frostholm Queen had never prepared for her own “resurrection”. Returning to the Mortal Realm had never been part of her plan from the very beginning.

Yet this ready, fearless attitude made Duncan feel strange.

“Are you really willing to give everything for Frostholm? Even more than your life?” He turned his head and looked into Ray Nora’s eyes with curiosity. “You spent more than ten years living in a cage beneath the Cathedral. You were not treated as a human being until you were twelve. You were watched, chained, and tested. Every thought you had, every sentence you muttered in your sleep, was taken as a possible sign of betraying humans and was analyzed again and again. You did everything you could, yet in the end you were still sent to the guillotine as the ‘mad Queen’… I do not want to judge anyone from a dark point of view, but at least from a logical angle, I am very surprised by your choice.”

Ray Nora fell silent. She leaned against her bed and looked up at the gauze hanging above. Her thoughts seemed to drift very far away. After a long time, she suddenly smiled and shook her head: “Yes… why am I doing this…”

She turned her head and gazed quietly into Duncan’s eyes with her gaze.

“Do you know, they could have burned me to death,” she said. “A long, long time ago, on the day I first woke from a nightmare, before I learned to say ‘Dad’ and ‘Mother’, before I knew I was a human… Captain, maybe the way I told my story made you misunderstand something. You think I should hate that cold city, but in fact it was that city that did everything it could to keep me alive.

“On a wider scale, it is our delicate yet fragile civilized world that is doing its best to let everyone live. That includes natural-born Psionics like me. Even if they had to use chains, iron cages, and a dungeon to hold me there for ten years, they never expected me to die in that cold place. They hoped I would come back as a human.

“I have never hated anyone, Captain. They did not treat me cruelly, because this world is cruel to everyone. Everyone is only doing the best they can.”

The former Frostholm Queen let out a soft sigh, then slowly rose and stepped down from her bed that was like a cage. Compared with the ten years she had spent in the Cathedral’s cellar, perhaps the only difference was that this bed did not have a ring of bars around it.

She walked slowly to the far end of the room and stood beside Duncan, looking out at the chaotic darkness of the Deep Sea.

“My parents and the people in the Cathedral did their best to keep me alive,” she said. “My supporters and I did our best to keep the city-state safe. Governor Winston and all his predecessors did their best to finish the work I could not. But very often, doing our best does not mean we will succeed. Failure naturally has its price.”

She slowly raised her arm and pointed at the huge tentacle in the darkness.

“Even the Elder Gods have to face failure, do they not?”

“If your theory is correct, new flawed replicants will appear sooner or later, waking from the creations of the mortal world,” Duncan said after thinking for a moment. “Destroying the flawed replicant here cannot fix the root of the whole world.”

“Other people will ‘do their best’,” Ray Nora said calmly, turning to look at Duncan. “What about you? Will you act?”

Duncan stayed silent for a while. Then he spoke softly: “I will do my best.”

“That is enough,” Ray Nora said with a smile. “Then do it. I have slept for too long. It is time to wake from this nightmare… and it is time to free It as well.”

There was a hint of urgency in her voice, as if she could hardly wait.

Duncan hesitated for a long time, then finally nodded in silence.

In the next second, a cluster of ghostly green flame suddenly appeared beside him. The fire spun and swelled, slowly turning into a swirling doorway.

He walked toward the great door, and at that moment Ray Nora’s expression suddenly changed a little.

She stared at the rising green flames, as if looking at a distant, hazy memory. Then she suddenly turned her head and looked at Duncan, who was about to step through the door: “It was you?!”

Duncan stopped. After a brief moment of confusion, he finally realized why the Frostholm Queen was reacting like this.

“I suppose this does not count as corruption of history,” he said, keeping his posture as if he were about to step through the door and turning his head slightly. “What do you think?”

“So that is how it is… so that is how it is…” Ray Nora murmured. Expressions flashed quickly across her face, as if many worries from years ago had suddenly become clear. Then a faint light seemed to rise in her eyes. For the first time, she showed a bright, heartfelt smile. She raised her head to look at Duncan and waved, just as she had once waved goodbye to an old friend many years ago. “Go on. Do what you must. I think… we are making the right choice.”

Duncan gave the Frostholm Queen one last, deep look. He did not say anything more. He stepped forward and walked into the spinning door of flame.

Ray Nora stood there quietly, watching his figure disappear from the room.

It was just like many years ago, when that gentle, learned old man had vanished into the morning light.

She slowly drew back her gaze and turned around. She stood at the broken edge of the room, looking at the Elder Gods’ tentacle that was now in a state of stillness. She looked at her nightmare of the past half century, and at all the fate and duty bound to it.

Thin strands of eerie green flame rose from the dark abyss of the sea beyond. At first they were as small as fireflies, but in an instant they spread quickly, growing larger and stronger, and began to spread and burn along the whole “pillar”.

A slight tremor appeared under her feet and grew stronger with each passing moment.

The mansion began to shake. The power that supported this dream was fading. The “connection point” between the Drifting Place and the outside world was breaking apart and vanishing. The darkness outside the room suddenly seemed to surge. Countless ripples and shifting lights spread wildly and then drew back into the dark again. In that unstable glow, the Elder Gods’ tentacle began to change. It seemed to bend. Vague structures grew from its tip, stretching and crossing the shifting border between real and unreal, bending down toward this shattered room.

Ray Nora only stood quietly before this terrifying sight. She watched the phantom, newborn smaller tendril bend and stretch toward her. She watched it finally reach the invisible boundary, where its black “flesh” pressed against the unseen barrier and spread out.

Ray Nora slowly stretched out her hand and placed her palm on that shifting surface of flesh. Through the dream’s barrier, she felt everything It was sending to her—confusion, tension, unease, and a hint of regret.

“Yes… I know. You never wanted to appear in this world… It will be over soon. Treat it as a dream. You will go back to where you should be…

“I will leave too, soon. When the anchor cable breaks, that will be the moment of departure… I might go very far away, or I might never have another destination. Even if my calculations are right, it will probably be a journey so long it is hard to imagine… So if there is any scenery to see, I will enjoy it.”

The soundless exchange went on in the dream. In these last moments before waking, Ray Nora suddenly felt a bit sentimental.

“We have been together for so long, and I have never asked your name,” she said, gazing with her gaze at the tentacle beyond the dream’s border and feeling the confused, broken messages It sent. Most of those messages could not even be called complete ‘thoughts’. They were more like scraps of inspiration from a damaged soul struggling to think. But in half a century together, she had grown used to ‘talking’ with this broken will. “Of course, I know the title Abyssal Lord, and I know you have other titles as well… but those are not your name…

“Do you have a name? Whether it is yours or your ‘true body’s’… It is nothing. I just suddenly felt curious.”

In the sea of chaotic noise and murmurs, one thought suddenly came through very clearly.

Ray Nora listened in silence, performing the Listening rite just as she had as a child, when she had crouched among cold bars and chains, listening to the vague whispers from the depths of the tide. A name seemed to rise in her mind as if she were half awake and half asleep.

A faint smile slowly appeared on her lips: “LH-01… what a strange name… Navigator One? Was that your original name?

“All right, I will remember it. It was a pleasure to meet you, Navigator One. Then… farewell, and good morning.”

A roaring wave of flame surged from the depths of the darkness like a tsunami and reached this place. In the blink of an eye it swallowed the tentacle that was touching the Drifting Place. In the burning flames, the Elder Gods’ flawed replicant returned to dust and ashes.

The blazing flames even burned through the dream’s barrier for a brief moment. At Ray Nora’s feet, in the air around her, and at the edges of the room, strange yet brilliant sparks bloomed like flowers.

Ray Nora watched the leaping spirit form flames with curiosity and reached out to touch their edges.

The warm fire faded at her fingertips.

In the dark, icy Deep Sea, the suddenly rising ghostly flames lit up the whole sea like a coronal eruption. They lit the dark floating island drifting in the Deep Sea and shone on the human-shaped empty shells that floated in the black water like a swarm of bees.

Duncan floated quietly at the edge of the dark floating island, watching the spirit form blaze he had lit burn fiercely. Its power was so great that even he, the one who had started the fire, felt a deep sense of shock.