Chapter 514

Chapter 514: Lighting Up

After the Sun went out, its remaining faint glow hung high in the sky. That weak light could not brighten the sea. It only made the whole world look even darker and more frightening.

The White Oak sailed through the depths of this darkness.

Lights on the ship were already on. The glow of oil lamps and electric fixtures mingled and spread out, lighting up a small patch of sea nearby. The small waves rose and fell in that weak light and somehow looked thick and ominous.

Lawrence held the wheel and answered the voice in his mind: “…The White Oak is still in good shape here. Aside from the sailors being a little nervous, nothing has gone wrong on board. But the area around us has fallen into darkness, and we have lost contact with the other ships on the route. Navigation has also failed, and the Stargazing Room can only see pitch black.”

Duncan’s voice echoed directly in his mind: “Can you reach Cold Harbor, the closest city-state to you? You should have left that city-state not long ago.”

“No,” Lawrence said. He glanced back at the communications console not far away and saw that all the lights on the machine were red. “All communications are down. The priest tried to use Psychic Resonance to reach Cold Harbor’s Cathedral, but there was no response—only the Psychic Resonance with Pland is barely holding.”

“Pland is fine, and Frostholm is also all right. Right now, aside from Frostholm, Pland, and Lightwind Harbor, we have lost contact with every other city-state. It feels… as if they all vanished after the Sun went out.”

Hearing Captain Duncan’s description, Lawrence’s expression slowly tightened. He swallowed hard, as if afraid to keep imagining what it might mean.

Then he lowered his head and glanced at the instrument panel beside the wheel, quickly checking each reading.

“We are sailing at full speed toward Pland. This is a very busy route. In theory, we should soon see a relay port—that is an island under the city-state of Lunsa. We will check the situation there and report to you at once…”

Lawrence spoke quickly in his mind, but before he finished, a sudden rush of footsteps cut off what he was about to say.

A crew member ran into the bridge in a panic: “Captain! Captain! You need to come see this! That ‘Sailor’ found something big!”

“Anomaly077?” Lawrence’s expression tightened at once. He turned to the First Mate beside him: “Gus, take the wheel. I’ll go take a look!”

Gus stepped forward at once: “Yes, Captain!”

Lawrence left the bridge in a hurry. Led by the crew member, he rushed down the stairs and through the corridors to the aft deck of the White Oak. As soon as he arrived, he saw a thin, shriveled figure busily moving along the edge of the stern deck.

Anomaly077, that bizarre living mummified corpse, was fiddling with something beside a huge iron barrel. He worked while muttering nonstop. Lawrence walked closer before he finally heard what the corpse kept muttering: “We’re done, we’re done, we’re finished this time. No one is getting away, no one is going back. The whole world is doomed. I might as well just sleep myself to death…”

This guy was overflowing with negative energy as always.

Lawrence did not want to hear Anomaly077 mutter any longer. He strode forward in two quick steps and cut him off loudly: “What are you doing?”

The mummified corpse jolted, as if waking from a dream, and quickly bowed and nodded: “Captain! Captain, you’re here… Oh, good, now that the Captain is here, everything feels safer…”

“Enough, enough,” Lawrence waved his hand and asked again, “What exactly are you doing?”

“You have to see this, you have to look at this…” the mummified corpse said in a panic. He hurried over to the iron barrel and stirred inside with a big pair of tongs. A thick, oily sound came from within.

Only now did Lawrence see that the barrel was full of fuel. Anomaly077 was using the tongs to stir a rag in the grease. Then the mummified corpse lifted out the oil-soaked wad of cloth, pulled out a lighter he had somehow gotten from a crew member, and lit the cloth.

Under Lawrence’s frowning gaze, Anomaly077 hurled the burning rag out toward the sea. The fireball hit the surface and, carried by the waves, quickly drifted toward the rear of the White Oak.

Anomaly077 muttered: “This is how sailors used to roughly measure speed—back before you people invented all those fancy instruments. It isn’t very accurate, but it’s useful…”

“I know. I’ve read about this,” Lawrence cut him off. “But what exactly do you want me to see?”

Sailor waved his hands hard and pointed into the distance: “Just keep watching. It’s almost there. Keep your eyes on that flame drifting away…”

Lawrence frowned and turned his head, staring at the flame floating on the sea. It was rapidly drifting toward the stern of the White Oak, which was only natural. The White Oak was moving at full speed, so there was nothing strange about it.

Until the flame suddenly stopped in the distance.

Lawrence’s gaze sharpened at once.

That fireball, which should have kept drifting away until the waves swallowed it or it passed beyond the limit of sight, stopped out there.

By a rough estimate, that spot was only a few hundred meters from the White Oak.

Lawrence stared hard in that direction, watching the flame that had stopped a few hundred meters behind the White Oak. It looked as if the fire was sailing at the same speed as the White Oak, following right behind it. Only after a long time did the flame slowly dim and finally go out at the edge of the dark water.

Sailor picked up another rag with the tongs, soaked it in oil, lit it, and threw it into the water.

The second ball of fire hit the water, quickly drifted backward, and then stopped at the same distance.

Anomaly077 finally tossed the tongs aside. He turned to look at Lawrence, his thin, ghastly face twisting into a miserable expression: “Captain, look… How are we supposed to explain this with science?”

This time, Lawrence did not tease this “Anomaly” for being obsessed with explaining everything with science like he usually did. He simply stood quietly at the edge of the deck. After a long while, he seemed to murmur to himself: “Did you see that?”

Anomaly077 beside him froze for a second: “Huh? Who are you talking to?”

Lawrence did not answer. Instead, Duncan’s deep, solemn voice sounded in his mind: “I saw it. I saw it very clearly through your shared sight.”

“How… do you see this phenomenon?” Lawrence asked carefully.

“The laws of physics are becoming strange. It is very likely some kind of ‘distortion’ in the field of space, or perhaps something deeper in the deep layers. In any case, after sunlight went out, the Boundless Sea began changing rapidly—and only the White Oak and the small area around it are still normal for now.”

Lawrence thought for a moment, then spoke hesitantly: “Is this your power at work…?”

“Perhaps. But I also need time to figure out the cause.”

Listening to the voice in his mind and staring at the dark, chaotic sea in the distance, Lawrence fell into deep thought.

Right then, a strange, low sound broke his thoughts. It seemed to come from the sky, yet also echoed through the whole world.

It was a weird, sluggish hum, like a giant beast struggling to breathe, or some unimaginably huge device slowly starting up. It sounded faint and far away, yet also seemed to fill the whole world, echoing in everyone’s ears.

Lawrence looked up in shock at the extinguished Sun.

The double rune rings around the Sun were flickering, their light rising and falling. As the rune rings flickered, faint threads of radiance slowly appeared on the Dark Sphere at the center of Visions001.

Those thin strands of light were at first weak and reddish, like veins of blood. Then they began to spread over the whole sphere and quickly grew bright…

…

The huge glowing geometric body floated above the sea. The even sunlight it released shone over Lightwind Harbor not far away, and over the Radiant Star moored by the floating docks.

On the highest research platform of the Radiant Star, Lucretia stared intently at the large circular crystal lens before her.

A faint blue glow floated around the crystal lens, while the center of the lens showed bands of shifting color, bright and dark.

The clockwork doll Lunie stood near Lucretia. As she adjusted the dizzying array of observation instruments with her precise, nimble hands, she reported to her Mistress: “Starting just now, there have been these strange ‘signals’ mixed into the sunlight released by the glowing geometric body. They can’t be seen with the naked eye, but the ship’s observation lenses can catch them. What we see is this pattern of bright and dark ripples that keep rising and falling…”

Lucretia raised her head and looked toward the front of the room. This research platform was enclosed, but there was a special window at the far end. sunlight from the glowing geometric body passed through that window into the room, then went through a complex lens array device. In the end it was split into Spectral Charts and projected onto special observation equipment. She had designed and built this entire system herself.

It was a large apparatus she had built specifically to study the glowing geometric body—and now it was doing its job.

Lucretia looked back and glanced at the Recording Engine on the table beside her. The machine was steadily feeding out a long strip of paper. On that paper, the changes in the spectrum captured by the lens system were recorded as jumping black lines with a clear, regular pattern.

“These ‘Light-Signals’ are patterned…” she said softly.

“Yes,” Lunie the doll nodded. “Each group of signals has a sending period of twelve seconds. They repeat three times, then pause for thirty seconds, and then appear again.”

“Are they being sent from that ‘stone sphere’?”

“It’s hard to say. People from the Truth Academy are monitoring the area around the stone sphere, but they haven’t seen any changes in the sphere itself. These Light-Signals seem more like they are appearing out of thin air in the bright region around the sphere…”

Lunie the doll stopped halfway through her sentence.

“Mistress, the Light-Signals have stopped.”

Lucretia stared in surprise at the crystal lens in front of her.

Those bright and dark, shifting colors had vanished.

She was dazed for a moment. Then she seemed to think of something. Her figure suddenly broke apart and turned into a storm of colorful paper slips that whirled out through the window.

The colored paper slips fluttered above the deck and quickly gathered together again. Lucretia stood on the upper deck of the Radiant Star, narrowed her eyes, and looked up at the sky.

Through the pale golden sunlight spread over the sea, she saw an especially bright glowing orb hanging high in the sky.

The Sun had lit up again.