Chapter 541

Chapter 541: The Chasm

Duncan knew his idea was bold and strange, so strange that even in this uncanny age of the Deep Sea it would sound far?fetched. The thought that a real heavenly body had been transformed into the ten?meter?wide stone sphere before him and made to float on the sea went beyond mere wild fantasy.

But once the thought appeared, he found it hard to drive it out of his mind. No matter how impossible it seemed, he could not stop thinking about it.

Because… it really was too similar. Not only in its looks, but also in a strong sense of intuition. There was even a strange feeling of familiarity, as if it crossed time itself and the very layers of the world, all surging in his mind.

Duncan stared at the pale sphere before him. For a moment he even felt that he had gone back to that familiar world and was using his gaze to look down on the moon over his homeland.

He stood there, staring fixedly at the Moon that floated beside the hull of the Radiant Star. His expression stayed frozen for a long time, until he heard footsteps at his side and Lucretia’s voice reached his ears: “Father, this is it.”

Duncan turned his head. He himself did not realize how strange his face looked in that moment: “Ah… yes. This is it…”

Of course Lucretia noticed the oddness in his expression and tone. She seemed to tense up a little, then spoke with concern: “Are you alright? Your face doesn’t look very good… is there something wrong with this stone sphere?”

“It’s… fine. Thank you for asking, Lucy,” Duncan waved his hand and tried hard to steady his expression. Then he turned again and pointed at the stone sphere. “It…”

He stopped.

He had no idea how to explain this to Lucretia. He did not know how to describe the idea of “the Moon”, how to speak of another world, or how to explain his reaction now, just like when he had stood before Tyrian. He did not even know how to start explaining what a “planet” was.

So he only opened his mouth, then forced himself to change the subject: “After it fell, did anything change about it? Was it like this from the start?”

“Yes. It has been like this from the beginning,” Lucretia said at once. She briefly described how she had first found this fallen relic, then added some details about moving it to Lightwind Harbor: “…It floats in the air at a fixed height above the sea by some unknown mechanism. If left alone, it stays perfectly still, but a ship can drag it with outside force. The inside is solid and dense. Several careful samples showed that its inner texture is similar to stone, but so far we have only managed to take material from the outer layers—the deeper we go, the harder it gets. The drill simply will not go any further…”

Duncan listened quietly, then asked: “What else? What have you found?”

“We have also tried to solve the mystery of the light around it,” Lucretia went on. “The huge geometric glowing orb wrapped around the stone sphere keeps releasing sunlight, enough to light an entire city?state. Yet this light does not come from the stone sphere itself, or at least not in any way we understand. The radiance is generated directly in the nearby space and then spreads outward evenly.

“To test this, we built a very large screen and covered the stone sphere completely. It proved that this had no effect at all on the glowing geometric body or the sunlight over the surrounding sea…

“And we also confirmed that the surface of the stone sphere is covered by a very, very fine dust. It is attached to the sphere by some unknown force. We can scrape it off for samples, but without outside interference it never falls away from the sphere, not even the dust at the bottom. It is as if some invisible force holds it there…”

Lucretia did her best to explain to Duncan the various tests the Scholars had run on this stone sphere and all the information she knew so far.

All the while, she watched the changes in Duncan’s face, trying to guess what feelings were hidden under his overly serious, heavy expression.

But she could not see through it. All of her Father’s thoughts seemed wrapped in a thick fog, hidden behind that familiar yet distant, stern face. The only thing she was sure of was that her Father cared very, very much about this stone sphere—far more than she and Tyrian had thought.

After a long silence, Duncan finally spoke: “You have taken many samples?”

“Yes. We scraped surface samples from many parts of the stone sphere, and this sampling is still going on,” Lucretia nodded. “The deeper parts are extremely hard and almost impossible to sample, but the outer layer is a bit more loose. We can scrape off grayish?white fragments that behave just like common stone dust…”

Here she paused for a moment and looked at Duncan with some hesitation. Then she raised a hand and pointed to the floating platform not far away that held the research station for the stone sphere: “Would you like to come over there and take a look with me?”

“…Alright.”

Duncan and Lucretia went to the research station the Elves had built. From the upper level of the station they crossed a connecting bridge to a small platform fixed directly to the surface of the stone sphere.

A ten?meter diameter was nothing for a heavenly body. But as an object hanging right in front of them, it was still a giant. Even without counting the height it floated above the sea, the sphere’s own size was taller than a three?storey house.

The Elves had fixed a platform to the “waist” of this huge thing, bracing it with a ring around the sphere and a series of bolts and slanting supports. The platform was small, only a few square meters, but enough to stand on.

Duncan stood on the platform, reached out his hand, and gently touched that… Moon.

A rough, cold feeling came from his fingertips, as if he were stroking a stone.

He drew his hand back and looked at the little bit of gray?white dust on his fingertips. He rubbed his fingers together, letting the dust slowly fall.

Some of the dust drifted toward the sphere and settled back on its surface.

“This phenomenon puzzles us too,” Lucretia said beside him. “The dust scraped from the sphere seems to be attracted back to it. When it gets close enough, the fragments return to the surface on their own. But this pull exists only between the stone sphere and its own material. We tested other light powders…”

Duncan made a quiet sound in reply but said nothing more.

“I heard my brother say that you called this strange stone sphere ‘the Moon’,” Lucretia said, watching Duncan’s reaction with care. “And you seemed very excited when you first saw it… Do you know something about this stone sphere?”

“It…” Duncan hesitated for a moment, then finally spoke slowly. “It does not look the way I know it. It should be very big. Much bigger than it is now…”

“Very big?” Lucretia blinked. “Bigger than the Vanished?”

“Much bigger than that.”

“Bigger than the Four Gods Church’s Pilgrimage Ark? Or bigger than a city?state?”

Duncan shook his head: “Bigger. Bigger than you can even imagine.”

“…Could it even be bigger than the Boundless Sea?”

“I have never measured the Boundless Sea, but… perhaps,” Duncan said softly, almost to himself. “Perhaps it is even larger than the Boundless Sea. Because this ‘boundless’ sea is, in truth, only a cage ringed round by mist.”

Lucretia’s eyes widened.

She did not know why, but in that instant she suddenly thought of her childhood. The questions they had just asked and answered seemed to rush back a whole century of time and stir memories long asleep in the depths of her mind. She dimly remembered that, many, many years ago, she had asked her Father similar questions.

Back then she had asked her Father how big the Boundless Sea really was.

Her Father had told her that the sea was very large, larger than the Vanished, larger than any city?state. As its name said, it was wide without end and could hold a person’s whole life of curiosity and urge to explore.

She had held that answer deep in her heart, and later followed in her Father’s footsteps to become an Explorer, a “border Scholar”. As one of the Homeless Fleet, she had followed her Father to many places, including the strange and distant border. She felt that the Father of her childhood had not lied to her—this sea really was very large.

Yet now her Father was telling her that the “Boundless Sea” was only a cage surrounded by fog.

The stone sphere before her, only ten meters wide, was supposed to be larger than the Boundless Sea.

Lucretia narrowed her eyes and raised her head to look up at the Moon before her. She tried her best to imagine it being larger than the Boundless Sea, and for the first time she felt how limited her imagination was. She could not understand what her Father said, and she could not even picture it.

“A Moon that big… how great a space would you need to hold it?” she could not help asking. “Like you said, it would be even bigger than this world…”

The Boundless Sea was not the whole world.

This thought rose in Duncan’s mind by instinct, but he forced himself not to say it aloud.

Because he had never truly measured this world, and had never passed through the mist called the border.

He did not dare say for certain whether the Boundless Sea really was the whole of this world.

And Lucretia was destined to never understand what a universe big enough to hold countless stars would look like.

Even though she had a ship, and that ship’s name was the Radiant Star.

“…I’m sorry, Lucy,” Duncan finally let out a soft breath. He turned his head and fixed his gaze on the Sea Witch’s eyes. “I have no way to explain this to you.”