Chapter 488

Chapter 488: Homeward Voyage

The fire spread faster and fiercer than Duncan had imagined.

He had only lit a small flame at the edge of that gigantic “pillar” and had been ready to wait for it to spread slowly. He had not expected that tiny spark to instantly swell into a towering blaze that lit up The Deep Sea. Beneath the weight of hundreds of millions of tons of seawater, the roaring fire looked even more uncanny than usual.

supernatural things were the best fuel for spirit form flames, and the Elder Gods’ tentacles naturally counted as “supernatural”. Even so, the fire still burned far too fiercely and too fast.

It was as if some power was acting as a catalyst, strengthening the spirit flame.

Was it the special environment of The Deep Sea itself? Or was that Elder God tentacle actively “cooperating”?

Duncan frowned a little and felt the enormous stream of information the flames were sending to him. The information was broken and scattered, mixed with masses of twisted noise and fragments of light and shadow. It seemed to be the uncontrolled spillover from the tentacle’s collapse.

To an ordinary person, even a single whisper from those things could have been enough to bring madness. Duncan only found them trivial and chaotic. He tried hard to pick useful information out of the jumbled noise, and right before all the noise faded, he finally “heard” a few “voices” he could understand.

In the water, he suddenly opened his eyes wide, a little stunned, and stared at the Elder God tentacle that was rapidly collapsing and disintegrating in the spirit flame.

“LH-01? Navigator One?!”

In the void, it was as if a roar came from The Deep Sea. The flawed replicant of the Elder God finally broke apart completely. All the noise vanished, and no voice answered Duncan’s sudden question. In the silence that followed, a silence that felt filled with endless emptiness, only one vague thought drifted quietly through his mind like a phantom in the mist—

“Thank you, bearer of the Flame Usurper.”

Duncan blinked. His mind surged with tangled thoughts and countless startling guesses and associations. He did not know how long passed. Just as he began to consider whether to keep exploring this place, whether to keep diving deeper, a flicker of fire suddenly appeared at the edge of his vision.

He snapped his head around and saw that the AI, which had been flitting around him, suddenly began to flicker violently, like a projection with a bad connection. The fiery glow over the whole pigeon turned dim and bright by turns. It beat its wings rapidly and let out a sharp, broken cry: “Your… signal quality is poor, please check… your hardware connec… remote server… wait…”

Duncan’s eyes tightened at once. He waved his hand and teleported the AI back. In the next second, as the AI returned to the Vanished, he noticed that the “temporary body” he was using was rapidly falling apart.

In the blink of an eye, cracks of all sizes spread over the whole of this rough-husk-like body. The eerie green flame that leaped within the cracks was rapidly dissipating.

In the surrounding seawater, the “human shapes” drifting everywhere also began to show the same signs of collapse. Countless human husks quickly turned into black fragments and sank toward that pitch-black floating island of Frostholm in The Deep Sea.

The flawed replicant of the Elder God had been burned away by the blaze, and the human Rough Husks that surrounded the floating island in The Deep Sea collapsed with it. Aside from the island itself, which might be the original Blueprint, everything in this part of The Deep Sea was quickly breaking down and dispersing, returning to… the “normal state of the original design”.

Duncan quickly worked out the chain of cause and effect behind these changes. In the next second, he felt his consciousness forcibly pop out of this body that could no longer be sustained.

Right before his senses cut off, only one thought remained in his mind—

What a pity about this body that suited The Deep Sea. He had thought he could use it for a long time, but it turned out to be another one?time shell…

The low rumble of the ballast tank pumping water out echoed inside the submersible. With a slight tremor, the whole machine began to rise faster.

At the controls, Duncan let out a regretful sigh, mourning the loss of yet another “temporary body” while he checked the machine’s status.

The Deep Sea turbulence caused by the collapse of that giant “pillar” had slammed into the slowly ascending submersible, but luckily it had not caused any damage.

Agatha’s voice, full of shock, came from beside him: “Just now… what was that?!”

She lifted a hand and pointed out the porthole, toward the stretch of dark Deep Sea that was quickly returning to gloom. Yet in the boundless darkness, traces of green radiance still flared now and then. Vast streams of ghostly green light looked as if they were burning furiously along some enormous wreck, or as if a chain of explosions were going off in that darkness.

Outside the submersible, chaotic currents churned everywhere. The noise of the machinery and the dull bangs that thudded from the hull from time to time were enough to rattle the nerves.

There was no doubt that something huge had just happened below.

“…I found the source of Frostholm’s crisis. At the center of that floating island in The Deep Sea that seems to be a ‘Creation Blueprint’, there was a gigantic Elder God tentacle. It was a flawed replicant of the Abyssal Lord, and its presence affected this entire sea area,” Duncan said as he turned his head slightly and glanced at Agatha, who was clearly waiting for an explanation. “For the past fifty years, the soul of the Frostholm Queen has been soothing that flawed replicant. She has held on for far too long.”

Agatha slowly opened her mouth wide.

She had not expected that Captain Duncan could simply go down in an avatar form to take a look and come back with news this shocking!

She stared in stunned silence for a long time before she finally snapped out of it and spoke without thinking: “Then… what then? What happened after that?”

“I burned it,” Duncan said, keeping it short.

Agatha did not react at first: “…You burned it?”

“I burned it,” Duncan repeated, and raised his hand to point out of the porthole. “Didn’t you see? I set it on fire.”

“No, it’s not that I didn’t understand you. I understand… no, I don’t understand, I really don’t understand,” Agatha actually became a little incoherent. Even when she had faced hundreds of cultists in that eerie and evil sacrificial ground, she had never felt this at a loss, but in front of Captain Duncan, who never seemed to follow any normal rules, her sanity always felt a bit lacking. “You just… burned it? An Elder God… even if it was only a flawed replicant of an Elder God… you just burned it?”

Of course Duncan had known Agatha would react like this, but he truly had no idea how to explain the endless details. After wrestling with it for a long while, he could only shrug helplessly: “Honestly, I was surprised too. It was more flammable than I expected.”

Agatha: “…”

After a brief silence, this Miss Gatekeeper finally managed to get her thoughts back on track: “Then… what about the Frostholm Queen’s soul? Did you ‘burn’ it along with everything else?”

“She gained her freedom, but I don’t know where she will go—maybe we will meet again,” Duncan said, each word completely honest. “I talked with her about many things, including her experiences while she was alive, the secrets in The Deep Sea, and some… truths about our world. Most of it is very subversive.”

“Very subversive?” Agatha still seemed not quite recovered from the earlier shock of ‘I burned it’. Her thoughts were clearly a step slow. She listened to Duncan and only spoke on reflex: “What kind of subversive?”

“The kind where, before you listen, you need to burn incense, receive a benediction, and write a will. And after you listen, you need Quarantine Observation and a Sanity Check,” Duncan turned his head and glanced at her. “I will tell you, once we are back on safe land and I am sure you are ready.”

Even as a Gatekeeper who had passed through many trials and had an extremely tough mind, Agatha still felt her nerves tighten at his words without thinking.

For this “captain” who could even return from Subspace to speak in such a solemn and serious tone… just what secrets had he learned in that cold, boundless darkness?

At the same time, back on the Vanished, Duncan had already returned from that “studio apartment” sealed in thick fog and come back to his captain’s cabin.

On the edge of the enchanted sea chart table, the dark Goathead creaked as it turned its neck. Its obsidian inlaid eyes fell on the captain.

“Name?” it asked in a stiff, formal tone.

“Duncan Abnomar.” Duncan waved a hand, sat down at the table, then looked up at Goathead again: “Was I gone for too long?”

“You were too far away,” Goathead seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, and its tone immediately relaxed. “I felt a strand of your will go to a very, very distant place, so far that even the Vanished could barely sense it. Please don’t be angry, I was only worried about your safety. After all, such a big ship is still counting on our wise captain to lead it…”

“That’s enough. I know all about your loyalty, reliability, diligence, and thoughtfulness. Don’t worry, it was only a distant but brief trip. It didn’t have any real effect—what is Alice doing?”

“Miss Alice?” Goathead paused for a moment, then spoke again: “She was resting in her cabin just now… ah, she is coming toward the captain’s cabin. She seems to be in a hurry.”

No sooner had Goathead finished speaking than hurried footsteps sounded from the deck outside the door, and Alice’s familiar presence appeared outside.

Just as a knock was about to sound, Duncan spoke first: “Come in.”

The next second, two knocks still came, and then the doll belatedly let out an “oh” outside, opened the door, and walked into the room.

“Captain! Captain, Captain!” As soon as she came in, Alice hurried over to Duncan. Before he could say anything, she rattled off: “Something happened! I just had a dream! I just had a dream!”

Duncan had originally had many things he wanted to say to Alice, but he had not expected her to be even more flustered than he was. He frowned: “You had a dream? What did you dream of?”

“I don’t really remember the details!” Alice said with full confidence. “I just felt like, in the dream, I was kind of… impressive? Like that feeling you talked about before… like I’d grown a brain?”