Chapter 544

Chapter 544: dusk

The captain’s cabin fell into silence.

Duncan still stared hard at the huge, eerie eyeball on the draft paper.

It was drawn with almost insane, messy strokes, yet it was unbelievably accurate and vivid. Anyone only needed one glance to understand what every line on that page meant. It was as if the truth of that thing was already woven into every element that formed the picture.

In those wild, tangled strokes, the huge eyeball had a deep, dark pupil, and the outlines of blood vessels and nerve clusters could just be made out. Outside the eyeball there was clearly a layer of dim material. Taran Ael had used many thin, careful lines to??that covering layer, as if he had tried his best to restore what it really was. The only message Duncan got from the drawing was that it was a “shell with a complex structure”.

It was an eye sealed inside a shell that looked like a gemstone.

Creaking sounds came from the side. Goathead, fixed at the edge of the enchanted sea chart table, twisted his neck in great unease. He seemed to want to take a look at the paper, yet he kept hesitating.

After a long moment, he finally spoke in a hesitant tone: “Captain… what does it look like, exactly?”

“It is an eye.” Duncan stayed silent for a few seconds, then began to explain the contents of the draft to Goathead, choosing his words as he went: “From the structure, it looks very much like a human eye. You can see the blood vessels and nerve clusters. It is sealed inside a spherical shell, and the shell looks like something man-made…”

Listening to Duncan’s description, Goathead became quieter than he had ever been in his entire existence.

Only after a long time did he crackle uneasily and make a nervous sound: “That really is… a terrifying sight… Vision 001’s true form is such a huge eyeball?! Then… then when the Sun went out, wouldn’t there have been a lot of people who…”

“Not many people could have really seen that scene,” Duncan slowly shook his head. “When the Sun went out, we also looked up at the sky. All we saw was a sphere that had fallen completely into darkness. You could not see any details with the naked eye. This drawing shows the same thing. That eyeball is ‘sealed’ inside a huge container.

“At the time, Taran Ael used a special observation device from the Truth Academy to see what the inside of that sphere really looked like. You don’t have to worry that ordinary people elsewhere might casually glimpse this madness-inducing ‘truth’.”

Hearing this, Goathead seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. But right after that, he started worrying again: “Not many, but there still could be some… Not everyone reacts like Taran Ael. Not everyone can seal and alter their own notes by instinct while in a mental runaway state. And judging by what Taran Ael did afterward, anyone who sees this eyeball seems unable to stop themselves from wanting to spread its image…”

Duncan listened to Goathead’s anxious muttering without saying anything. His face stayed calm and dark as water. He seemed to be deep in thought.

Goathead nagged for quite a while. When he saw that the captain did not react at all, he finally could not help but remind him: “Captain, do you think we should maybe warn…”

“Pland and Frostholm don’t have anything like that observation device. That lens array belongs to the Truth Academy. It is precise and rare,” Duncan finally raised his head. “Outside of Lightwind Harbor, even if someone tried to observe the surface of Vision 001 while the Sun was out, they would still not see these ‘truths’.”

“Pland and Frostholm don’t, but other city-states might!” Goathead shouted at once. “Who knows what those reckless fools might do! Mortals are not a reliable race!”

“…Other city-states never saw that extinguished Sun,” Duncan suddenly said.

Goathead, who had been working himself up, went quiet in an instant.

“Have you forgotten?” Duncan reminded him calmly. “Only three city-states and the ‘Vanished Fleet’ saw the world where the Sun went out. The rest of the whole Boundless Sea did not go through those twelve hours of darkness at all.”

Goathead’s head swayed left and right a little, then he finally let out a confused little sigh: “Oh… er…”

Duncan did not say anything more. He simply lowered his head again to look at the sketch that showed the core structure of Vision 001. As he did, another scene slowly rose up in his mind.

A blazing, splendid corona. Below the corona, twisted, coiled limbs of flesh. And a dying giant eyeball, held up by countless pale, fleshy limbs.

The Crawling Sun Wheel – the Black Sun.

Duncan’s brows tightened bit by bit. Once that faint sense of familiarity appeared, it could no longer be ignored. The memory in his mind quickly overlapped with the sketch on the paper. Bold ideas started to rise one after another in his heart.

“…It looks a lot like the true Sun god’s eye.” He suddenly whispered to himself.

“Ah?” Goathead jumped at once. “What terrible thing are you talking about?!”

“This eyeball looks very much like part of the ‘Crawling Sun Wheel’s’ structure,” Duncan said slowly, his expression thoughtful. As the details in his memory filled in, his judgment became more and more certain. “Yes. Very much so. If you take this ‘eyeball’ out and look at it alone, it is almost exactly the same.”

With a sharp little crack, Goathead’s neck seemed to jam at a certain angle. He went completely stiff on the enchanted sea chart table and fell silent.

Even a chatterbox like him had, for the first time, nothing at all to say.

Duncan let out a slow breath. Then he folded the draft carefully and tucked it away close to his body.

Luckily, Lucretia had been cautious enough not to leave this sheet with the ordinary scholars of the Truth Academy. He truly had no idea what kind of disaster that might have caused. Even though the Truth Academy did not have his convenient “spirit form flame” to remove the seal on the page, they still had all kinds of strange research methods. It was very possible that they could have restored the true image on that draft in the end.

Just then, hurried footsteps sounded outside the captain’s cabin and broke Duncan’s thoughts. A knock followed, and Morris’s voice came from outside: “Captain, I have something to report to you!”

Duncan quickly adjusted his expression and looked toward the door: “Come in.”

The door of the captain’s cabin opened. Morris walked in quickly and, as he walked, took a letter from inside his coat: “Captain, Heidi suddenly sent a letter. She mentioned… something unusual in it, and I need to report it to you.”

A letter from Heidi?

Duncan paused for a moment, then reached out to take the letter. He had not expected that, so soon after they had built their link and he had told her the truth, that Miss Psychiatrist would contact them again. At the same time, he felt puzzled: “Why didn’t she just come to the antique shop to find me? Why did she send the letter to you instead?”

Ai traveled between the Vanished and Pland every day. Besides carrying necessary supplies, she also did routine mail pickup and delivery at places like the Cathedral, Morris’s house, and the Governor’s residence. So it was normal for Heidi to send a letter through those channels. But if she wanted to contact the captain of the Vanished, then going straight to the antique shop would clearly have been the easier option.

“…She is still a bit nervous and afraid,” Morris explained with a slightly awkward tone. “After learning the truth, she probably doesn’t dare meet your avatar form directly.”

“…That nervousness is unnecessary. Just last week she came to my shop and bought a vase,” Duncan muttered. He casually opened the letter, ran his eyes over the lines of words written in obvious haste, and his gaze suddenly changed a little.

In the next moment, Duncan put away his relaxed expression. His face turned serious, then gradually grew heavy. He quickly read through the rest of the letter, then stayed silent for a few seconds before raising his head to look at Morris: “She ran into a Ender…”

“Yes. And according to her description, it seems to have been one of the rational ones,” Morris nodded. “Though that uninvited guest’s ‘rationality’ is suspicious. He muttered nonsense from start to finish and never explained anything clearly…”

Clearly, this old mister, who had spent his life teaching many students and always believed that “knowledge should be explained simply, directly, and clearly”, was very unhappy with this riddle-speaking cultist mentioned in the letter. There was a lot of resentment in his tone.

“Not speaking clearly might be because of some kind of restriction. What matters is that he was willing to talk. That is the main difference between the two kinds of Ender,” Duncan said quickly. Then he lowered his head again to glance at the letter. The various bits of information described there flowed into his eyes.

The fourth Long Night… the Promised Ark… the Sun becoming ‘gentle’, the coming of dusk, and… “holes” that appeared with some kind of “variable” and kept growing…

Heidi had tried her best to record in the letter exactly what she had heard from that Ender, all his strange, rambling claims. She had not added any “extra work” based on her own guesses.

These messages alone were enough to fill Duncan’s mind with countless guesses and connections.

“That Ender did not seem very clear-headed. And he appeared in the daytime instead of at night like other ‘normal’ preachers,” Morris said from the side. “He talked about the fourth Long Night and also about many ‘signs’ that would appear before it began. It seems that the very fact he could appear in the daytime was itself a ‘harbinger’ that this so-called fourth Long Night is about to begin…”

The fourth Long Night…

In Duncan’s mind, the description he had read in “The Blasphemous Tome” surfaced on its own:

There had been three Genesis Protocols, and they were the “three Long Nights”. The king of the pale giants had died in the first Long Night. The King of Dreams had died in the second. During the third Long Night, the Crawling King had finally succeeded in shaping all things. Together with the Critt clan, He lit the Sun that now shone over the world, ending the veil of night. Yet He Himself, because He had changed the Blueprint without permission, had been exiled by the other ancient Elder Kings and could never return to the throne…

Duncan slowly rose from behind the chart table and walked to the window.

The Sun was about to sink below the sea’s horizon.

Bound by magnificent double rune rings, the bright and warm orb slowly sank into the sea. Its afterglow washed the waves in gold.

Duncan gazed at it with his gaze and imagined that he was actually looking at a giant eyeball, larger than any city-state, that had been watching this world for ten thousand years.

This “eye”, which had risen into the sky in the age of the ancient Critt kingdom, had now grown old and weak.

The Veil of warm, peaceful light that it had woven seemed about to fall with the Sun’s death. After this Veil vanished, after the “fourth Long Night” that the Ender had described really arrived… what would this world’s “dusk” look like?