Chapter 489

Chapter 489: Turning the key

Duncan quietly looked at Alice, and Alice looked back at Duncan with the same confident expression.

After a moment, Duncan rubbed his brow first and felt a strange emotion rise in his heart, a sense of wrongness that would not go away.

It was clearly the same face. How could it show such a completely different air…

“Captain,” Alice blinked curiously when she saw Duncan’s reaction and leaned closer to ask: “Why aren’t you saying anything? Did I say something wrong?”

“…No, it’s not your fault.” Duncan shook his head, pulling himself out of his messy thoughts. Then he suddenly lifted his gaze and looked at the doll in front of him with a solemn, serious expression: “Alice, have you ever been curious about the connection between you and the Frostholm Queen?”

Alice froze for a moment, raised a hand to scratch her head, and seemed to think quite seriously before she answered, not very sure: “I… have been curious, but then I thought about it, and it didn’t seem like something very important, so I stopped thinking about it.”

Duncan was a little surprised: “Not very important?”

“The Frostholm Queen is the Frostholm Queen, and I am me. No matter how great that queen is, that’s her business, and I don’t understand it anyway,” Alice said with a very serious face. “I have things I’m good at, and I really like my days now. That’s good enough. And I heard Mr. Morris say that in this world everyone might find another person who looks almost exactly like them, so I’ll just think of the Frostholm Queen as the person who looks exactly like me—though I’m actually a doll…”

Duncan quietly listened to the doll’s words and watched the natural, content light in her eyes when she talked about her days now. Something was suddenly moved in his heart.

Maybe… she really was only a special, flawed replica made by an Elder God in The Deep Sea. Maybe she really was only the result of Ray Nora falling into The Deep Sea and fusing strangely with that Guillotine. Or maybe even more secrets were hidden in her, secrets that even Ray Nora could not have imagined… But just as Alice herself had said, that was not very important.

She was not clever, yet she was very happy. There were many things she could not understand, but she had never felt nervous or afraid because of these overly complicated matters. She had been born and lived in a world full of strangeness, yet this strange world was, to her, the most ordinary kind of “normal”. In this world, full of novelty and unknowns in her eyes, she explored, she felt curious, she looked forward to everything, including tomorrow, just like…

a child who opened their eyes under the sunlight.

The living beings of the mortal world were beyond counting, yet even the bravest warrior, the most learned sage, and the most devout believer could not look at this world from a viewpoint like Alice’s.

Duncan suddenly had a feeling. In this eerie world where everyone carried fear in their hearts and all things were twisting out of shape, Alice, this “doll”, seemed more like a “human” than anyone.

Just like the ordinary humans he had seen in that other world, in that world without Anomalies and Visions, without Gods and weirdness, who walked calmly under the sunlight.

“Captain?” Alice’s curious voice sounded again: “Why are you spacing out again?”

“It’s nothing,” Duncan shook his head. “I just suddenly felt that… you actually have a lot of wisdom.”

When Alice heard the captain praise her, she froze for a moment, and then a happy look slowly spread over her face: “Hehe…”

She did not know why the captain suddenly said she had “wisdom”, and she had never even thought that she might have any wisdom, but if the captain praised her like this, then it was certainly something to be happy about.

After praising her, Duncan fell silent for a brief moment, thinking. Then he slowly reached his hand to his side. A cold touch came to his fingertips. It was the brass key.

In The Deep Sea, the submersible was still slowly rising, and there was still some time before “recovery”.

Ray Nora, the Frostholm Queen, had given him a great deal of information, but much of it was still incomplete or vague and needed him to verify it himself.

The brass key… A rational Ender had placed it in Ray Nora’s hands, yet even with her abilities, she had never managed to understand the true “essence” of this key. At the same time, on Alice, this flawed replicant who seemed to have been born purely by “coincidence”, a matching Keyhole had appeared… Was it still coincidence at this point?

Had that Ender foreseen all of this today? Or, when that Elder God tentacle sleeping in The Deep Sea created “Alice”, had it searched through Ray Nora’s memories and left the “Keyhole” in Alice’s body?

Maybe… it was time to try.

“Alice,” Duncan suddenly raised his head and looked at the doll in front of him with a solemn face: “Come with me.”

“Ah?” Alice was startled for a moment, but she quickly reacted, stood up, and followed: “Oh, okay!”

“Hold the helm.” Duncan rose from behind the enchanted sea chart table, gave Goathead a brief instruction, then took a light breath and turned toward the captain’s quarters.

Not knowing what was going on, Alice followed behind Duncan and walked through the bedroom door with him. At his instruction, she turned back to close the door, then turned again and looked at Duncan curiously.

“Captain? What are we doing next?”

Duncan silently held the key in his hand and looked at the doll: “I want to test this key.”

When Alice heard this, she was a little surprised: “Ah? Didn’t you say this key might be dangerous? That the Frostholm Queen’s soul might be living inside it or something…”

“The hidden danger has been cleared,” Duncan said calmly. “I just dealt with it myself.”

“Oh!” Alice answered at once. Then she turned around and felt for the zipper on the back of her clothes without a bit of hesitation: “Then I’ll open my clothes first…”

“You only need to expose the Keyhole,” Duncan said. Even after spending so long with this solid?headed doll, he still felt a bit embarrassed by her complete lack of hesitation. He reminded her without thinking, then added with some surprise: “You’re not afraid?”

“You said there’s no hidden danger anymore, Captain,” Alice said, turning her head. “And you’re the one who will wind me up yourself. If something goes wrong, you’ll definitely protect me, right?”

“…Yes, I will protect you.” After a brief two or three seconds of silence, Duncan slowly nodded. Then he raised his hand and pointed to a round stool beside the bed: “Sit here—I’m not sure what will happen after I wind you, so you’d better not stand.”

“Oh!” Alice agreed and obediently came over to sit on the round stool, turning her back to Duncan.

The doll’s clothes were already open at the back.

Duncan finally saw what the “Keyhole” looked like. It was set right in the center of Alice’s back, which was as smooth as white porcelain. The Keyhole was embedded there abruptly, surrounded by a ring of fine, ornate patterns with a texture like gilding.

Duncan lowered his head and glanced at the brass key in his hand.

…The size and shape really did match perfectly.

A strange feeling rose in his heart, mixed with a bit of tension. Duncan took a light breath, controlled that odd emotion, and slowly brought the key close to the round hole.

“Alice.”

“Mm?”

“Don’t be afraid.”

“Okay!”

The winding key slid into the Keyhole without the slightest resistance. Right after that, a clear “click” sounded beside Duncan’s ear, as if it rang directly in his mind.

Some mechanism had been triggered—but it was not an ordinary clockwork.

A faint force came from his fingertips, and Duncan instantly realized that the winding key was turning by itself. It slowly turned to a horizontal position, and then another “click” came.

In the next second, everything before his eyes began to change sharply.

Light and shadow collapsed and reformed. His senses went through a shift and reset. There was that familiar slight dizziness again, that feeling of “transfer” like walking in the Spirit Realm—

Before he had time to sigh in his heart: [Here we go again], everything around Duncan had already settled down.

He now stood inside a grand mansion that was old and splendid, yet also gloomy and eerie.

The classical and solemn hall was wide and empty. Tall pillars lined both sides of the hall, holding up the gloomy roof above that was like a mass of gathered dark clouds. Long, narrow windows were set into the walls, which were covered with patterns and reliefs. Outside the windows, black thorns seemed to crawl across the surface, and muddled lights and shadows swirled beyond the thorny tangle.

And in this grim, uncanny mansion, human voices sounded now and then—whispering, broken bits of talk and laughter, footsteps on the floor, and even… strange, blurred music, as if a ball were being held somewhere.

Duncan frowned slightly and let his gaze sweep over the gloomy old house.

Something flashed at the edge of his vision.

Duncan quickly looked in that direction but saw only an empty corner.

But he was sure he really had seen something just now. There had been a figure… who looked like a maid in a black and white dress.

That figure had no head. At the collar of her blouse there was only a bare neck.

Duncan stood in the empty hall for a moment, carefully observing the surroundings and sensing the faint, uneasy aura drifting in the air. Then he began to walk toward the spiral staircase that wound upward at the end of the hall.

He had to figure out what this place was—why had winding up Alice brought him here?

He went up the spiral stairs. The steps, which felt as if they had been abandoned for countless years, creaked strangely under his feet. As he walked, a sense of familiarity suddenly rose in his heart.

He stopped abruptly and widened his eyes at the furnishings and style of the mansion.

He knew where that familiar feeling came from.

The room where Ray Nora, the Frostholm Queen, had slept!