Chapter 493

Chapter 493: The Stolen Room.

With countless questions and guesses in his heart, Duncan tucked the brass key safely close to his body. Alice stood obediently beside him, her eyes darting back and forth like a child waiting to hear a secret.

“Do you feel anything different now?” Duncan asked, looking into Alice’s eyes.

“Something different?” Alice tilted her head. She reached back and touched her spine. After a moment she shook her head. “Just now the Keyhole felt a bit itchy, but it doesn’t itch anymore.”

Duncan frowned. “Nothing else? That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Alice answered honestly. Then she looked a little curious. “Was there supposed to be something? Your face looks so serious… Did you figure out the key?”

Duncan’s brow stayed tightly furrowed. After hesitating for a short while, he finally sorted out his thoughts and words. He sat down on the bed opposite the Doll and spoke with a very serious face: “You may have felt only an instant pass, but I stayed in a strange place for a long time. It was an old, huge manor. Its name… was ‘Alice Mansion’.”

The Brother Doll widened her eyes bit by bit. She listened to the captain’s story in surprise and confusion.

Duncan did not hide his experiences in Alice Mansion. He told Miss Doll in front of him everything he had seen and heard there. Then he spoke of what he had seen and heard in the Deep Sea as well, including his meeting with Queen Ray Nora of Frostholm.

Of course, he knew Alice might only understand part of it, and even the part she understood would be muddled. She would not remember much afterward. But he still chose to tell her everything.

Because these were things she should know. He could not think, “She won’t understand anyway,” and hide it all from her. That would have been the bare minimum of respect lost.

Alice listened in a daze all the way to the end. Even after Duncan finished speaking, it took another ten seconds before the Brother Doll finally came back to herself. “…Wow.”

Then she scratched her hair, looking puzzled and a little apologetic. “I… don’t really get it. My head feels all blurry… Sorry, Captain. You worked so hard to help me understand all this, but I think I’m a bit dumb…”

“No, you’re not dumb. These things are just too complicated,” Duncan said, already expecting this reaction from her. He smiled and shook his head. “Even I feel that everything about this is full of riddles. There are too many clues and they’re too scattered. We’re still a long way from tearing open the final fog.”

Alice nodded, half understanding and half not. She thought seriously for a while, then suddenly asked with some curiosity: “Were there a lot of people in that ‘mansion’? And none of them had heads?”

“I only saw one person who called himself the Butler. But from what the Butler said, there really were many people in the mansion. They were all just hiding,” Duncan said, thinking back. “From what I saw, they should all have been headless Attendants.”

Alice frowned. She tried hard to think as she muttered, “Could it have something to do with my ‘Decapitation’ ability…?”

“That’s possible. I can’t rule out that some of the Attendants are the souls of people you once decapitated,” Duncan said. As someone who knew about “Alice’s Guillotine”, he had naturally thought along that line. But then he changed direction. “However, from some of the information the Butler gave me, the mansion has also gathered many souls that ‘drifted’ and came together. They’re like some kind of wandering dead who receive the mansion’s shelter. Those Attendants don’t seem like they were decapitated…”

He paused and thought for a moment before going on: “Maybe your Guillotine ability makes all the souls gathered in the mansion appear headless, no matter what their original ‘source’ is.”

“Oh…” Alice seemed to understand. Then something else seemed to occur to her. “What about that ‘Frostholm Queen’? Did she really just disappear?”

“The room really did vanish,” Duncan nodded. “It looked just like she said. Once the Elder Gods’ tentacles that acted as ‘connection points’ were destroyed, the ‘drifting land’ would lose its anchor, like a ship whose mooring lines have been cut, and…”

He suddenly fell silent. His expression turned thoughtful.

“Captain?” Alice looked at Duncan, puzzled. “Why did you stop talking?”

She asked twice in a row before Duncan lifted his head from his thoughts. His tone held a trace of weight. “I’m wondering whether the ‘drifting land’ Ray Nora spoke of refers to her room or to the entire Alice Mansion.”

“Eh?” Alice froze. “Is there a difference?”

“If the drifting land means the entire Alice Mansion, then when the ‘connection point’ was burned by me, the thing that should have disappeared was the whole manor, not just one room on the second floor,” Duncan said slowly. “But if the drifting land refers only to the room where she slept, then what exactly is the relationship between that room and the rest of the manor? Or to put it another way… doesn’t the ‘connection’ between her room and the whole mansion also count as a ‘connection point’?”

He paused here and lifted his hand to point at Alice.

“More importantly, after I turned the winding key in you, I entered that ‘Alice Mansion’. It’s obvious that the bond between that manor and you is the strongest. You and it should even be some kind of ‘one mind, one body’. If the ‘drifting land’ needs a connection point to exist in a stable way… then you are clearly the most stable connection point.”

Alice blinked hard and listened carefully, trying her best to understand—but she failed.

Still, her strength had always been honesty. “What are you talking about?”

“The room where the Frostholm Queen slept had been ‘torn’ away from the main body of the mansion. The edges showed clear damage. At first I didn’t pay much attention to that, but just now I suddenly realized… Ray Nora may have hidden some things from me.

“In theory, the so-called ‘drifting land’ should be the entire Alice Mansion. That manor is closely linked to you, and from what I saw, it did not show any tendency to ‘drift’. So it’s very likely that Ray Nora took advantage of the moment when I burned the Elder Gods’ tentacles—when some of the ‘connections’ weakened—to forcefully separate her room from the main body of the mansion.”

Alice continued trying to understand.

This time, she finally managed most of it.

“So you mean the Frostholm Queen used your fire as a chance to ‘sail’ her room away? Like taking the lifeboat off a ship in thick fog?”

Duncan froze for a moment and looked at the Doll in mild surprise. “That’s actually a pretty fitting metaphor… How did you come up with it?”

“Mr. Goathead told me lots of stories like that,” Alice said earnestly. “Like mutinous sailors stealing the lifeboat in the fog, or stealing the wine barrels, or stealing the cheese, or stealing the salted fish. Then the wise and mighty captain would cross the whole Boundless Sea to take back the stolen salted fish… Are you going to catch that Frostholm Queen who stole the room?”

Duncan listened in a daze. When Alice finished, he finally smirked and twitched the corner of his mouth. “Let’s not even ask why the mutinous crew would steal salted fish, or why I would cross the whole Boundless Sea just to grab back a piece of salted fish—where would I even find that Frostholm Queen? Besides, if anyone is going to catch her, it should be you. She stole your room. You’re the Mistress of Alice Mansion.”

“…Right,” Alice said after thinking about it for a bit. She accepted the logic very simply, then shook her head. “Then I won’t chase her. That room was hers in the first place. But… why would she do that? You just said, once the drifting land loses its anchor, it’ll fly all over the place. It might even fall into Subspace, like exile—that’s really scary, isn’t it?”

Duncan could not help falling into thought. He spoke slowly as he pondered: “Yes… why indeed…”

He thought of the Ray Nora he had seen. He remembered that Frostholm Queen who seemed to have worn shackles since birth, who was crowned in chains and overthrown in chains. Even after falling into the Deep Sea, she was still locked in a nightmare.

She had said she slept in a cage all her life, even after the bars were taken away.

Now she had broken out of prison—with her cage in tow.

“Probably for ‘freedom’,” Duncan said softly.

But was it really only for “freedom”?

…

On the control console, the needles on the gauges shook rapidly. The shaking that came when they neared the surface grew more and more obvious. Through the thick glass porthole, the dark, boundless seawater around them already showed faint rays of light spilling down from above.

sunlight appeared in the water—this meant the submersible was quickly nearing the surface.

Yet the growing brightness could not fully drive away the oppressive mark left by the Deep Sea. It was as if something in the vast darkness below the submersible was still rising and spreading, still stretching out invisible tentacles, still reaching upward with unseen hands, trying to keep the uninvited guests who had once intruded into the Deep Sea.

The things Duncan had told her during the ascent still circled in her mind—horrifying, strange, unbelievable, shaking the very foundations of her beliefs.

Whether it was the soul of the Frostholm Queen, who had spent fifty years in a symbiotic pact with the Elder Gods in the Deep Sea, or the terrifying possibility hidden in all things of the mortal world, either alone was enough to make a person with firm will and devout faith feel an icy chill under the sunlight.

All things in the mortal world were Spawn of the Elder Gods. The Elder Gods’ flesh and blood lived in all beings, and it was slowly waking.

Not even the most filthy, blasphemous, heretical tomes dared to record words like these. Even the craziest Annihilators had stopped at ideas like “the Abyssal Lord created the world”.

The sunlight from the surface grew brighter and brighter.

Yet the already-dead body felt no warmth at all.

Agatha clasped her hands over her chest and silently called Bartok’s name, wanting to offer a Prayer to her God.

But no matter what she did, she could not calm her heart.