Chapter 540

Chapter 540: To the Moon

Lucretia slid several meters across the deck. It happened so suddenly that Duncan did not even have time to react, much less understand what had just happened.

Only when the Sea Witch scrambled back to her feet did he hurriedly let go of the scrap of paper in his hand.

The colorful scrap shot away with a soft whoosh and quickly sank into Lucretia’s hair. She still stood there in place, a little dazed, with no clear expression on her face.

She had probably been stunned by the fall.

“Lucy…” With embarrassment deep enough to scrape a hole in the deck, and a faint sense of guilt, Duncan walked carefully up to the still?dazed Sea Witch and asked: “Are you alright?”

Lucretia gave a little jolt, as if she finally woke from the daze caused by the fall. She slowly turned her head. Her expression shifted from blank to shocked. She stared at Duncan in disbelief for a long time before finally breaking the silence: “How did you do that?”

“Ah?” Duncan did not follow. “Do what?”

“You grabbed… the ‘shadow’…” Lucretia spoke slowly, as if struggling to find words for something too abstract. Then she raised her arm. Starting from her fingertips, part of her arm quickly broke apart into drifting, colored scraps of paper that whirled around her. “Could you try it again so I can watch?”

Still puzzled, Duncan reached out and casually snatched one of the colorful scraps.

In the next second, the fluttering paper suddenly collapsed and came back together as Lucretia’s arm. Her face changed again in surprise.

“This is unbelievable!” The Sea Witch stared wide?eyed at Duncan. “Nothing like this has ever happened before. Can you tell me how you did it?”

Watching this daughter he had more or less picked up for free suddenly light up with a Researcher’s excitement, Duncan himself still had no idea what was going on. He frowned at the colorful scrap in his hand, looking completely confused: “Is that really so hard? They’re just bits of paper flying in the air…”

“They can’t be caught, Dad,” Lucretia said, spreading her hands. “If Phantom Wind could be broken just because someone grabbed one piece of paper, how could I use it as my main way of moving around? They’re all phantoms. In theory they pass through every barrier…”

“I didn’t know that,” Duncan shrugged. “I just saw the paper and got curious, so I grabbed one to take a look. Sorry… did it hurt when you fell? Did you hit anything?”

Lucretia froze for a moment.

It seemed that no one had spoken to her with that kind of concern for a very, very long time.

Ever since she had become the powerful Sea Witch, a bearer of the curse who made many people afraid, and the captain of a ghost ship, she had no longer heard words like this.

It made her feel a little awkward.

“I… I’m fine,” she said, shaking her head with a strange look on her face. She tried to push down the awkward feeling and turn her mind toward thinking. “You can grab phantoms… is that one of your powers now? What is its essence? Is it about understanding the deep layers of the world? Or is it because of Subspace?”

Lucretia really sank into thought. Her instinct to explore the unknown made her forget her embarrassment at once. She muttered as she thought: “…Could it be that, on the layer of Subspace, there is no real difference between matter and phantoms from the Mortal Realm? That everything in the mortal world is just the same kind of ‘concept’ in front of Subspace… Was Claude Divens’s theory right? That all things are ‘concepts’ and form unified projections in Subspace…”

Duncan listened to the Sea Witch muttering beside him. At last he could not help interrupting her: “Lucy… you can study this some other time.”

The Sea Witch snapped back to herself at once, but she still stared at Duncan with wide, unblinking eyes.

Duncan lowered his head and looked at the colored scrap in his hand. His own thoughts began to churn as well.

He had not thought that these bright scraps of paper were such special “things”. From Lucretia’s reaction, his casual move just now seemed enough to be called “world?shaking”.

He had caught a phantom—yet Duncan knew he had no power to catch phantoms.

He simply had not known that these scraps were phantoms.

His thoughts rose and fell. Old events and guesses floated up from his memories. Certain “things” appeared in his mind—it was the fish.

After who knew how long, he spoke at last in a low voice, almost to himself: “Its essence… might be ‘I don’t know’…”

Lucretia heard her Father mutter, but she was completely lost: “What do you mean? Are you saying you don’t know what this power really is?”

Duncan came back to himself. He opened his mouth as if he wanted to explain something to his daughter, but after hesitating several times, he still shook his head.

“It means something else, but I don’t know how to explain it to you—Lucy, I’ll tell you another time when we have the chance. For now we still have other matters.”

He turned his head and looked at the great “wall of light” that had already come before the bow of the Radiant Star, pressing down on them with its vast, heavy presence.

“Take me to see that stone sphere first.”

Lucretia nodded, but did not leave. She still stood there, looking at her Father with a tangled, complicated gaze.

Duncan frowned in confusion: “Is there something else?”

Lucretia hesitated, then carefully raised a hand and pointed: “Could you… give that back to me first?”

Duncan looked down and saw that he was still holding the colored scrap she had split off for their little “experiment” earlier.

His face stiffened at once. He let go as he coughed and apologized: “Ah—sorry.”

The scrap floated up, then shot into Lucretia’s arm, filling in a patch that had been dull and colorless.

The Sea Witch watched this with a strange look. Then she nodded to Duncan, turned, and dissolved into a cloud of swirling colored paper, ready to fly toward the bridge. But she had barely gone half a meter before she stopped, her figure re?forming. She turned back to him uneasily: “Please don’t grab me this time…”

Duncan’s face grew awkward: “…Of course.”

Lucretia nodded again and turned away, then turned back once more, still uneasy: “If you’re curious, we can talk first and do the experiment together next time. Really, don’t just grab me.”

Duncan spread his hands, half amused and half helpless: “I won’t grab you. I’m not a little child.”

Lucretia let out a soft “oh”, then hesitated for a good while as she turned. At last she sighed: “I’ll just walk there instead…”

And so the Sea Witch walked all the way to the distant bridge.

Duncan watched her back with a strange expression as she walked away, and could not help thinking:

Luckily, Master Taran Ael had been too nervous to come out on deck with him and was still resting in his cabin. Otherwise, this scene would not be just a warm father?daughter moment plus a little embarrassment.

The Sea Witch might well have chosen to silence him on the spot—and then Taran Ael really would have died on this ship.

His messy thoughts circled once in his mind. Duncan let out a slow breath, and his mood finally calmed. At the same time, under its captain’s own hand, the Radiant Star made a slight adjustment to its heading and then sailed straight into the vast “curtain of light”.

Pale golden sunlight, like some kind of solid crystal yet without the least resistance, filled his view and slowly swallowed the Radiant Star.

Duncan stood at the very end of the foredeck. He watched calmly as the sunlight swept toward him and then drowned him completely.

He tried to guess what this sunlight really was. He raised his hands a little, as if to feel its “touch”.

On the way here, he had already heard Lucretia share much information about this glowing fallen relic. He also learned that, during the time when the Sun went out, this glowing geometric body had kept sending out regular light?signals. There was a lot of information—yet not one piece could explain the “moon” at the center of the glowing geometric body.

Duncan narrowed his eyes slightly.

Small shadows appeared in his field of vision.

They were the things Lucretia had mentioned before: the research station the Elves had built at the center of the glowing geometric body, and the mysterious stone sphere that sat beside it.

The station was a two?storey building put up on a floating platform. The stone sphere floated less than a few meters away from that platform. Temporary walkways and many steel cables linked the two, holding the platform steady.

As the distance shrank, more and more details on the stone sphere came into Duncan’s view.

Now, at last, he confirmed it here in the Mortal Realm.

Those familiar markings. Those plains, lowlands, and ring?shaped mountains in light and shadow. The image that had appeared again and again in his recent memories, that he had seen more than once in books and on the internet—the Moon.

“It really is it…”

A vague, nameless mix of feelings spread through his heart. It was not surprise; Duncan had already been surprised before. It was not confusion either; he had already been puzzling over this for a long time before today.

In this moment, he was only confirming and witnessing something that had entangled him for a long time. A strange fact he could not understand and could hardly accept now stood before him in a way that left no doubt.

The Radiant Star slowed. Under Lucretia’s control, this living ghost ship—just like the Vanished—came to a stop with unbelievable precision only a few meters away from the stone sphere.

Duncan walked to the edge of the deck. From here he could see every tiny pattern on the surface of the stone sphere.

He became more and more sure. This sphere, only about ten meters across, had an astonishing level of “accuracy”. It was so fine and matched the surface details of the Moon so well that… it did not look at all like the “scale model” he had first imagined.

It felt as if it was the real Moon itself, compressed down to this size.