Chapter 543

Chapter 543: True Form

In the crew quarters below the deck, Shirley sat in her room, frowning at the spread-out workbooks on her desk and sighing over and over.

“So many… how am I ever going to finish…”

“If you keep sighing, you’ll never finish,” Dog muttered beside her. “And it’s not that much. You only have this pile because you drag it out and don’t do it every day. Even Miss Alice manages to finish these exercises on time every day, you know?”

“Does the way she just writes whatever pops into her head on the page count as ‘finishing’?” Shirley rolled her eyes, then dropped her head onto the desk. Her voice came out muffled as she mumbled: “I want to go ashore and play. I want to go into the city-state and buy things. I want to eat something good… Nina said Lightwind Harbor has a ton of great food, food from all over the world…”

Dog had gotten used to this sort of muttering many years ago. It shook its head, completely unmoved: “Captain said you can go ashore to play when you finish all the homework you’ve been putting off.”

Shirley pouted, glanced at the workbooks on the table, and thought for a bit. Then her eyes lit up with a mischievous glint. She bent down carefully toward Dog, who was sprawled on the floor: “Hey, how about you help me? These questions must be really easy for you…”

But before Shirley could finish, before Dog could even respond, a voice suddenly came from the mirror on the desk: “I’m watching.”

Shirley let out an exaggerated, miserable “Ah—”, looked up at Agatha’s figure appearing in the mirror, and almost seemed about to cry: “Can’t you watch someone else for once? Why do you pop out of the mirror no matter what I’m doing?”

Agatha in the mirror looked very serious: “Because the captain told me to watch you while you work.”

Shirley gave a long, hopeless sigh and buried her head back into the workbooks. After rubbing her face over the pages a few times, she suddenly looked up again: “Then can’t you help me a little…”

“No,” Agatha replied without hesitation.

Shirley began to argue: “That’s not how it goes in the stories! In the stories, the magic mirror knows everything. As long as you ask it something, it tells you the answer…”

Agatha frowned: “What strange story is that?”

“Captain told it to Nina, and Nina told it to me.”

Agatha had been about to dismiss it as nonsense, but her expression suddenly turned solemn. After thinking for a few seconds, she looked straight into Shirley’s eyes and asked: “The captain really told Nina a story about a ‘magic mirror’?”

“Y-yeah,” Shirley answered, now a bit nervous, not sure why Agatha had become so serious. “He told it just a couple of days ago…”

Agatha fell into deep thought, muttering under her breath: “He set me to dwell in the mirrors on the ship… so there was another meaning behind it…”

Shirley did not follow at all: “Uh… huh?”

Agatha didn’t answer. After thinking hard for a while, the “Gatekeeper in the mirror” finally raised her head and glanced at Shirley: “Which problem can’t you do?”

Shirley thought for a second, then pushed the workbooks forward: “…This whole book.”

“This book?!”

“Yeah. If that’s too much, I can do the quick mental arithmetic part at the front…”

“Do it yourself!”

Back in the captain’s cabin, Duncan suddenly looked up with a puzzled expression, as if listening to distant sounds.

On the chart table, Goathead turned his gaze toward him at once: “Is something wrong?”

“I think I ‘heard’ Agatha’s voice,” Duncan said casually. Of course, he hadn’t really “heard” anything. The ship was simply passing him information from every corner of the Vanished. “She seems to be in Shirley’s room, and she’s pretty worked up.”

“Do we need to go check? Or should I call her over?”

“No,” Duncan shook his head. “Everyone who’s ever been put in charge of watching Shirley do her homework ends up worked up. You could even see it as a kind of mental training…”

Goathead gave a small “oh”, and it was hard to tell whether he actually understood the joke. Duncan silently felt out the state of every part of the Vanished again, then walked to the desk and sat down, letting out a quiet breath: “It’s about time Shirley and Nina went ashore to relax. Lucretia is heading back to Lightwind Harbor anyway. We’ll have her take them along.”

Goathead watched the captain’s movements and expression closely. At last, it couldn’t help speaking: “You seem to be in a good mood?”

“Maybe it’s because I’ve figured some things out. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve put them down for now.” Duncan raised his eyebrows. In his mind, Alice’s bright, sunny face appeared all on its own, and the corners of his mouth curved in a faint smile. Then he shook his head and reached into his coat, taking out the “sketch” he had received from Lucretia.

Now that the gloom in his heart had cleared, it was time to study what exactly Taran Ael had drawn in the notes he left after observing Vision 001.

“What is that?” Seeing Duncan’s action, Goathead immediately turned its head curiously. The obsidian-black eyes seemed to glimmer faintly.

“This is a sketch Taran Ael drew after observing the surface of Vision 001,” Duncan said. He unfolded the paper and held it up near the oil lamp to see it more clearly. “It might hide the true appearance of the Sun’s surface – but Taran Ael smeared out the most important details himself.”

Goathead froze for a moment and let out a vague sound: “…Oh.”

“I thought you’d warn me right away about how dangerous this is, like you always used to,” Duncan said, a bit surprised by Goathead’s reaction. He lifted his eyelids to look at the thing. “Why aren’t you nagging this time?”

“In the past I worried about your safety. Now I only worry about the safety of those foolish enough to oppose you,” Goathead said at once, flattering him with great skill. “A mere sketch could never threaten the great Captain Duncan, even if it showed the true form of the Elder Gods. Besides, the one who drew it was only a mortal. How much truth could that Taran Ael really glimpse?”

Duncan ignored this string of obvious flattery and focused on the drawing instead. But no matter how long he studied it, flipping it back and forth, he still could not make anything out behind all the wild smudges.

He even felt that those seemingly random strokes were like some kind of powerful “seal”. On the level of occult studies, they “covered” the original image on the paper, rather than simply being a layer of ink that blocked the eye.

In the middle of his thoughts, an idea suddenly stirred in Duncan’s mind.

A “seal” that actually carried power?

He lowered his head again and carefully studied the crisscrossing lines and thick patches of ink on the draft.

Taran Ael was a seasoned and experienced scholar, and a devout believer of the God of Wisdom Rahm. He suffered from a body full of ailments thanks to his awful habits, but his skill in occult studies was undeniably deep.

If a grand scholar like that had truly noticed something extremely dangerous while observing Vision 001, he would have tried at once to use more “professional” methods to contain that danger, even if his sanity had already started to slip…

The ink on this sheet probably wasn’t just random smearing. That meant there was no way to see what lay beneath it by ordinary means.

This was actually a “secret letter” that had been treated with extraordinary power.

Duncan frowned slightly as a vague idea rose in his heart. Then he turned his head and fixed his gaze on the oil lamp beside him.

Under his gaze, the flame in the oil lamp suddenly jumped, then quickly turned a ghostly green.

The fire of his spirit form swelled and burned, rising even out of the opening at the top of the lamp.

After a brief hesitation, Duncan picked up the sketch and held it over the lamp, in the heart of the spirit form fire.

In an instant, the roaring green flames swallowed the entire sheet.

There really was some kind of extraordinary “disguise” clinging to it.

Goathead cried out in alarm at the sight: “Why did you burn it?!”

“The fire of my spirit form only burns away the ‘distorted’ parts,” Duncan said calmly, giving a glance to the panicking Goathead. With a small flick of his wrist, he quenched the flames leaping on the paper. Beneath them, the fragile draft was indeed still whole. “This is what it really looks like.”

As he spoke, he lifted the fire-treated sheet to his eyes and looked at the pattern that had reappeared.

The next second, his expression froze.

Goathead immediately noticed the change on the captain’s face. Worried and curious, it twisted its neck, trying to see. But from its angle, it couldn’t make out the front of the page, so it could only shout: “What’s on it? Are you alright? Is it…”

Duncan finally snapped out of his daze. He drew his gaze away from the paper, looked at Goathead with a strange expression, and said: “…It’s the true form of the Elder Gods.”

Goathead: “?!”

Duncan did not say anything more. He slowly lowered his head again and studied the drawing on the sheet with full attention – that sphere locked inside two rings of runes, that shape shrouded in dark shadows, its surface veined with hideous threads like blood and cracks, as if it were glaring in rage…

An eye.

The true body of Vision 001 was a gigantic eyeball, sealed inside a shell of darkness.