Chapter 546

Chapter 546: .

Lucretia stared in silence at the clockwork doll lying on the lab table. Alice stood on the other side of the table, looking tense and uneasy, while Duncan stood beside Alice, his face blank.

After the awkward mood had dragged on for a long time, Lucretia finally broke the silence: “…So Lunie took her own head off?”

“…The process was complicated,” Duncan said stiffly. “I was surprised too.”

Lucretia could not help glancing at Duncan.

She did not know if it was just her imagination, but she felt that on the always grim, always gloomy face of her Father, there had been a trace of… embarrassment just now.

“I’m sorry…” Alice finally spoke. She lowered her head and carefully pinched the hem of Duncan’s coat, clearly aware she had caused trouble again. “I saw Lunie is also a doll, so I thought dolls are all the same, and… I was surprised her head isn’t actually removable?”

“…It seems Lunie also thought she was the same as you,” Lucretia said, giving a complicated look at this “Anomaly 099” who had once made countless people tremble in fear. “But I never designed that ‘feature’ for her.”

Just then, Lunie’s separated head on the lab table suddenly moved. Her head blinked, and her voice sounded a little off-key: “Mistress, could you connect my head first? I’m sorry for causing you trouble…”

Lucretia looked down at the clockwork doll’s head with a blank face, sighed, picked up a tool from the side, and began removing the cover plates and decorative pieces around Lunie’s neck. As she worked, she could not help asking: “Why did you follow Alice without even thinking?”

“Alice… is a new friend,” Lunie’s head said from the side. Her mouth opened and closed with a faint crackling noise. “A new friend brought by Old Master.”

Lucretia’s hands paused for a moment. Then she said nothing more and kept working.

Alice watched Lunie’s head a little nervously: “Then are we still friends from now on?”

“We can be,” Lunie blinked. “But we have to wait until Mistress fixes me…”

Alice brightened at once, then suddenly seemed to notice something shocking: “Ah, when your head is off, you don’t stutter anymore when you talk!”

“Yes. Because my head can operate on its own. Mistress installed a complete vocal system in my skull, and my thoughts are not affected by the loss of my body,” Lunie explained in a serious tone. “The difference between you and me is that once my neck breaks, I cannot recover on my own.”

Alice thought about it. She did not really understand, but she still nodded: “Oh—so amazing.”

Duncan watched from the side, feeling that this scene had already become as bizarre as it could possibly get.

More uncanny than a cursed Doll whose head could fall off was, indeed, giving that doll another doll as a friend. He had not even introduced Alice to the other strange “servants” on this ship yet.

If this big goof wandered all over the Radiant Star, how chaotic would the ship become?

As Lucretia bent over Lunie’s joints, busy with disassembly and repair, she suddenly felt a jolt in her heart. She lifted her head in confusion and looked around but could not find the source of that sudden chill.

Soon, though, her attention moved on to other matters.

“About that ‘eyeball’ recorded by Captain Taran Ael—what do you think of it?” The “Sea Witch” turned and looked at Duncan. “We definitely can’t make this public to ordinary people, but as for the Four Gods Church…”

“I do plan to tell them, but I still haven’t decided which channel to use, or whether I need to make more direct contact with their high ranks,” Duncan said, quickly gathering his scattered thoughts. His expression grew serious. “Right now the key isn’t that ‘the true body of Vision 001 is an eyeball sealed inside an artificial sphere’. Since history began, Vision 001 has been unknown to mortals anyway, so its real form could be as strange and terrifying as you like. What really matters is what that eyeball looks like.”

“The way that eyeball looks…” Lucretia’s hands slowed, and her brows drew together a little. “You said it looks very similar to… some structure of the Creeping Sun Wheel?”

“The true body of the Creeping Sun Wheel is an Elder God wrapped and scorched by a corona. Among the layers and layers of its tentacles, a huge eyeball structure is its main feature,” Duncan said with a nod. “That eye left a deep impression on me—it stared at me for a very long time.”

Listening to Father, Lucretia suddenly looked around uneasily, then glanced back at Duncan with some hesitation: “Talking about the Elder Gods so directly while we’re at sea…”

“It’s not a big problem. Even if that thing’s ‘gaze’ really gets drawn here, it will only fall on me,” Duncan waved his hand. “And I’ve been wanting to find it anyway.”

Lucretia opened her mouth, but for a moment she did not know how to answer.

In this past century, she had roamed the Boundless Sea and seen many things. She had dealt with many Madmen and had taken part in more than a few forbidden and dangerous events. But even those taboo topics were not usually discussed in such a blunt, casual way.

She felt she might really need a long time to relearn how to get along with the Father of today.

Duncan did not notice Lucretia’s brief, complicated expression. After a short silence, he thought of something else: “Do you still remember the ‘intruder’ that appeared in Captain Taran Ael’s dream? That projection of the Sun Spawn.”

“I remember. You said it looked like a smaller version of the Creeping Sun Wheel,” Lucretia said with a nod. “You also said that Sun Spawn had a short conversation with you, and that it and its minions were searching for something in that dream.”

Duncan nodded slightly, then spoke slowly: “The core of Vision 001 is an eyeball that is extremely similar to the core of the Creeping Sun Wheel. Twelve hours after Vision 001 went out, the Sun Spawn used Captain Taran Ael’s Dream Invasion to enter the Nameless One’s dream and searched that dream with its minions. Those two events are clearly linked.

“On the other hand, for thousands of years the Black Sun believers have claimed that the god they worship is the ‘true Sun’ and have called the Sun in the sky the ‘false sun’. People always thought this was only their mad delusion, caused by the Black Sun’s spiritual corruption twisting those believers’ view of the world. Yet when the Sun went out, Captain Taran Ael found that there really is an eyeball sealed inside Vision 001, one that is extremely similar to the core structure of the Creeping Sun Wheel.

“Lastly, there is that cultist of Annihilation who invaded the Nameless One’s dream. According to the information I’ve gathered, the goal of the Cult of Annihilation is not the same as the Suntists’. In that dream, they were searching for ‘the first blueprint from before the Holy Lord created the world’. But according to The Blasphemous Tome, during the Genesis Protocol of the Abyssal Lord, that Lord once guided the Critt clan, and may even have personally helped them build Vision 001. So strictly speaking, the current Vision 001—the ‘false sun’ in the mouths of the Suntists—can also be seen as the Abyssal Lord’s ‘masterpiece’, a part of the original blueprint.

“This last point may also explain the ‘cooperative state’ I observed between the Cult of Annihilation and the Sun cult. They are indeed cooperating, but it’s obvious their relationship is not a friendly one.”

Duncan slowly laid out the thoughts he had been turning over in his mind these days. Then he lifted his eyes and looked into Lucretia’s.

“From all this information, what comes to your mind?”

Without noticing it, Lucretia had already stopped moving. Her expression shifted several times, heavy and uneasy at once. After a long pause, she finally broke the silence in a low voice: “…Even if a cultist who worships the Black Sun were standing here, I think they would say this is a bit extreme…”

“…I heard something similar not long ago,” Duncan shook his head. “Now I only hope that the truth in the deep layers of our world isn’t more insane than this. Otherwise, compared to real history, even the most extreme cultists will seem conservative.”

Lucretia said nothing. She only lowered her gaze slowly, sinking into thought.

Lunie’s head still lay on the lab table, her eyes meeting the Mistress’s thoughtful stare.

After a while, Lunie finally could not hold back: “Mistress… are you still fixing me? Maybe you should go next door to rest for a bit? You could let Rabby come help…”

Lucretia let out a breath and pushed aside the stray thoughts in her mind. She picked up her tools and got back to work: “Rabby would only stuff your head into its own belly to ease its endless hunger for ‘cotton’. Don’t move. I’m putting your head back on.”

“Oh.”

…

At the same time, in the governor’s office of Lightwind Harbor, Governor Sara Mell unfolded a document that had just been delivered to her desk. As she read its contents, this Elf who had already lived for a very long time slowly furrowed her brows.

The document came from the Four Gods Church. It was not issued by any single Church, but carried the seals of all four Popes, witnessed by the Four Gods, and had been sent to every city-state on the Boundless Sea.

It ordered the creation of an early warning system jointly built by the city-states, the Church, and the Explorer associations, to monitor any anomalies that might appear in the city-states, on the sea, or under the sea, to guard against a repeat of the Frostholm crisis and to guard against the Elder Gods waking.

The Four Gods Church would also pull part of its patrol fleets back from the borders into the inner regions of the civilized world, so they could respond at any time to emergencies across the world.

These two points were worrying, but still normal enough. At least for the rulers of the city-states, they could still be understood as “work duties”.

What really made Governor Sara Mell frown was the final line of the document. It seemed to be mentioned casually, yet it stood out as especially important—

“All city-states must take seriously any warning signals from the Vanished or from the Vanished Fleet. If the main vessel of the Vanished is found operating in the waters near a city-state… you must not take any hostile action, and should… cooperate as needed.”