Chapter 530

Chapter 530: The Uninvited Guest

For the first few minutes, Heidi did not rush to get up from the hospital bed. She carefully watched her surroundings and listened to the sounds outside the room. Then she lifted her wrist and checked the number and color order of the little stones on her bracelet.

After that, she unconsciously reached to touch the amethyst pendant on her chest. A faint chill came from the gem to her fingertips, carrying a quiet, reassuring strength.

As she thought of the pendant’s true origin and the source of this Protective Ward, Miss Psychiatrist’s expression turned a little strange. But she quickly pushed that odd feeling down, leaving only a helpless sigh in her heart.

She could not help murmuring softly: “Fate really is unbelievable…”

“Yes, in your eyes, fate truly is unbelievable.”

A strange, low voice suddenly came from her side. Heidi snapped awake at once, and all her muscles tightened.

She jerked her head toward the sound. By the ward’s window, a figure in an old dark-brown robe was sitting there, though she had no idea when he had appeared. The worn robe hid almost all the lines of his body. A thick, wide hood covered his face completely in shadow. From his hunched posture, his deep voice, and the faint wrinkles at the edge of the hood’s shadows, one could only guess that he was an old man.

sunlight slanted in through the window. Tiny specks of dust floated slowly in the evening light. The rays fell across the folds of the stranger’s robe, leaving broken, mottled shadows. For a moment, his figure seemed almost like a half-transparent phantom.

Who was this? When had he appeared here? Had he been here all along?

A string of unnerving questions flashed through Heidi’s mind. At the same time, her hand moved on its own toward the trunk beside the bed.

But before her fingers touched the trunk, that low, hoarse voice came again from the window: “There is no need for so much hostility, Miss Heidi. Today I am not your enemy—and your golden spike and pistol cannot kill a temporary traveler. Sit down. I only came to talk with you, to help ease your boredom.”

Heidi’s face stayed expressionless. She still drew the pistol from the hidden compartment in the trunk, quietly lifted it, and pointed the muzzle at him. Her voice was low and cold: “…What are you?”

The robed figure did not answer Heidi. Instead, he slowly raised his arms and examined his hands carefully in the sunlight falling through the window, as if he had just found something very interesting. He moved his arms back and forth in the sunlight, observing them again and again.

The sleeve of the old robe slipped down. The arm beneath was dry like a dead branch, the skin wrinkled and cracked.

Heidi watched this strange behavior, her face tense with alertness. Then she suddenly noticed the eerie state of that arm in the sunlight—it really did become transparent from time to time. For a few brief instants she could even see the sunlight pass through his arm and shine directly onto her side.

“How unbelievable… I had almost forgotten what sunlight looked like…”

The robed man sounded full of wonder, his tone carrying a hard-to-name emotion. Then he suddenly turned his head. It sounded as if he was speaking to Heidi, yet also as if he was simply talking to himself: “…Before the Fourth Long Night begins, things will change. sunlight will grow gentle. The sharp ‘boundary’ that sunlight once drew will blur. What was exiled, what was forgotten, what was erased, what was changed will, for a short time, be allowed to return to this world. We will bathe together in this dusk and wait for the moment when the Sun sets…”

His low voice flowed on. Rather than speaking to any living person, it sounded more like he was facing a finished book, slowly reading out the ancient words already written there.

Like a preacher, proclaiming fate to the world.

As Heidi listened to his chant, which seemed to hold some strange charm, a thought stirred faintly in her mind. Her gaze sharpened at once: “Ender?!”

The robed figure finally raised his head. In the dim shadows beneath the hood, a pair of eyes glowed with an eerie golden light. They rested on her calmly, like a gaze: “Miss Heidi, you have established a connection with that Promised Ark. Did you see the End of that journey?”

“I have no interest in a cultist’s temptation.” Heidi’s voice was hard and cold. Her finger pressed a little tighter on the trigger, while her other hand unconsciously clutched the amethyst pendant at her chest. A nervous tension slowly spread from her heart.

She had no real confidence. She had dealt with psychiatric patients and their illnesses. She had fought monsters and shadows from nightmares. But she had never faced a “rare enemy” like a Ender. The mortal world had very few records on these Subspace madmen. The self-defense courses at Truth Academy’s attached martial school had no special training against this kind of cultist. She did not know how much use her pistol would be, nor whether the supernatural power she commanded would work at all.

Yet the uninvited guest showed no reaction at all to her obvious hostility.

He seemed very different from the Enders described in the textbooks Heidi had studied.

“We smelled something unusual, Miss Heidi, right after the Promised Ark arrived,” he said slowly, even politely. “A huge, boundless void. It appeared after the End. There was nothing there… We have been seeking a way to avoid Doomsday. But now it seems that beyond Doomsday lies an emptiness far more terrifying than Doomsday itself… You have come into contact with It. Now you have become a part of that void as well. This makes us very curious… What exactly happened?”

His words sounded rambling and obscure, like one mute riddle after another. It was as if he still possessed reason, yet after a long and chaotic stretch of time had completely lost the ability to speak normally with an ordinary person. Even so, Heidi still caught some vague bits of information from his scattered phrases, and her feelings could not help but stir.

She frowned slightly.

“You mean… Duncan Abnomar? You’re saying he brought some kind of ‘void’?”

The old preacher slowly rose from the chair. In the sunlight, he proved taller than Heidi had imagined. Even with his hunched back, he stood like a giant. “I don’t know. We only know that the void has appeared, and that it is growing. Perhaps one day, it will cover the whole night sky of the Fourth Long Night…”

Heidi tensed at his sudden movement and raised her pistol a little higher. “Heretic, what do you want from me?”

“…We desperately want to know the nature of this void,” he actually answered her question seriously. But soon he shook his head. “Sadly, it seems I did not come at the right time.”

Heidi paused in surprise and blurted out: “What do you mean?”

The other man did not answer. He only turned slowly and looked at the sunlight outside the window.

“You just mentioned the Fourth Long Night. What does that mean?” Heidi asked quickly.

The uninvited guest only waved his hand.

“In this Window Interval, we can only exchange a little,” the Ender said softly, stepping toward the sunlight. “The time to leave has come. We may meet in the next Window Interval, or we may not. That depends on how fast the void expands… But no matter whether another window appears or not, we will meet again sooner or later… dusk is near.”

His figure finally became completely transparent and, in the next instant, melted into the sunlight.

Heidi froze.

If her memory had not been so clear and firm, if the solid feel of the pistol and the amethyst pendant in her hands had not been so definite, she would almost have thought she had fallen into yet another dream.

Then, as the Ender’s presence vanished completely, she suddenly felt that the “atmosphere” in the room had changed in a subtle way.

It was as if some sealing power had faded from the room.

Hurried footsteps sounded in the corridor outside the ward.

…

On the Vanished, in the captain’s cabin, Duncan sat quietly at the chart table. He was still thinking over the information he had seen and sensed in that strange dream earlier.

He did not know how much time had passed before Morris’s voice suddenly came from the side, breaking his thoughts: “I thought you would consider letting Heidi join this ship.”

Duncan looked up and smiled at the old gentleman: “Didn’t you say before that you didn’t want her getting too close to the Vanished?”

“At the time… I was still a bit nervous about this ship,” Morris answered with an embarrassed little smile. Then he shook his head. “And back then, Heidi knew nothing about us. Now that she already knows, there’s no need to keep her at such a distance.”

Duncan thought for a moment and spoke quite seriously: “True. But when I thought it over, it seemed this ship doesn’t really need a psychiatrist.”

He turned his head and glanced out the window, then said casually: “Who here needs counseling? You don’t. Agatha doesn’t. I certainly don’t. Vanna’s will is so strong it even shocks me. Shirley’s sanity is bound to Dog, and Dog is a Abyssal demon. Nina is a fragment of the Sun. Alice… Alice doesn’t have a scheming bone in her body. Anyone else? Goathead?”

Goathead, lying on the chart table, snapped his neck around the moment he heard his name: “Ah, great Captain, your First Mate is forever steadfast and reliable, and will never be beaten by so?called psychological problems. I even self?studied many courses in psychology, so I can fully—”

“Shut up.”

“Oh.”

“So, you see,” Duncan turned to Morris and spread his hands, “if Heidi did come aboard, the one most likely to need a psychiatrist on this ship would probably be Heidi herself.”

Morris considered it for a while. He quietly picked up his pipe and muttered before putting it to his lips: “That does seem true…”