Chapter 547

Chapter 547: .

On Crown Street, in a neighborhood at the edge of Lightwind Harbor’s Upper City, there was a mansion wrapped in mystery, standing at the very end of the street—No. 99 Crown Street.

It was a three?story, steep?roofed building with a clear northern city-state style, completely different from the Elf-style houses common in Lightwind Harbor. It had a dark roof that sharply contrasted with its white outer walls, and tall windows with intricate carvings and solemn lines. Wide gardens spread out in front of and behind the house—quite rare in the city-state—filled with all sorts of strange flowers and bushes that almost no one could name.

Many people knew this mansion existed, but almost no one knew anything about it. Its master almost never showed herself. On normal days only a few quiet, tight?lipped servants tended the garden and the house. After nightfall, when lights came on inside, eerie and frightening shadows would appear in those lit windows—

Some people firmly claimed they had seen those servants, who tended the house in the day, take off their human skins at night and turn into creaking puppets and tin men that walked back and forth through the rooms. Some said that when they passed near the mansion, strange whispers lured them away, and when they snapped out of it, they had somehow appeared somewhere else. Some even swore they had seen the flowers and plants in the front yard turn into pitch?black thorns at the very moment the Sun set, wrapping the entire first floor of the house like a cage.

Strange rumors spread from all this, too many to count. In the wildest stories, busybodies claimed that a Lady’s vengeful spirit was imprisoned inside the house, that the power of a curse seeped up from the basement and transformed the original servants—when night came, it turned them into tin men and puppets with no mind or memory.

In the end, though, these tales all proved to be nothing more than the nervous fantasies of passersby. In city-states on the Boundless Sea, there were always plenty of such rumors and wild guesses.

The changes and corruption brought by the veil of night kept everyone on edge. Many people, in their excessive vigilance, treated every whistling cave and every empty house with strange noises as a nest of filth growing in the dark. The Guardians of the city-states dealt with many reports involving the supernatural every day, and there were bound to be some such nervous “false alarms” among them. In general, as long as this tension did not cross the line into “spiritual corruption”, it was not a real problem.

After all, simple nervousness was not enough to actually “create” something in the dark. It was better for citizens to have enough caution than to stay numb when real supernatural contamination began.

As for the mansion’s true master…

The Sea Witch had long grown used to the fearful looks and horrible rumors that followed her. In fact, to some extent, part of the rumors around No. 99 Crown Street had been spread by her on purpose.

“I needed a place in the city-state to rest. Always staying at sea would strain anyone’s nerves. I’m no exception,” Lucretia said. After returning to her ‘home’ in Lightwind Harbor, she walked to the window and looked at the quiet door outside. “But I don’t like dealing with people. It’s hard to find a place in a city-state where no one bothers you. Even the most remote streets are crowded. So I might as well make a bit of scary noise, so people won’t stand at my door staring out of curiosity.”

“Why not try learning from Tyrian?” Duncan was curiously studying the furnishings in the big house. When he heard Lucretia, he spoke casually: “He picked an uninhabited island in the Frost Sea to serve as a base for the Sea Mist Fleet. He hasn’t had to worry about being disturbed for a whole century…”

Lucretia turned her head: “And then get caught by you, Dad, while secretly watching strip shows at home?”

Duncan coughed twice at once: “Ahem, don’t talk about your brother like that—say it to his face next time.”

Lucretia: “…”

The Witch’s eye twitched. She herself did not even know whether she liked Father’s current personality, but she knew she clearly needed some time to get used to it.

Soon she smoothed her expression and said: “I can’t copy him. Taking an island means building and managing countless facilities, commanding a whole fleet, and maintaining an entire system from logistics to external dealings. I don’t have the mind for that—it would eat up a huge amount of the time I use for research. Just keeping the Radiant Star running already uses up all my energy.”

Footsteps came from the side. A servant in a black?and?white uniform walked over with a tray. On the tray lay warmed towels and cool drinks to ease the weariness of travel. The servant bowed slightly to Lucretia and Duncan. A stiff, corpse?like smile was frozen on its face, and the ticking of clockwork gears came faintly from inside its body.

“You and Tyrian each have your own field of talent,” Duncan said. He took a glass from the tray and, still curious, looked over this “footman” that was almost no different from a real person, yet, if you stared a bit longer, clearly felt wrong enough to stir fear. “Before I met you again, I heard many rumors about you. Those rumors said you siblings were cold to each other, almost hostile. Now that I see it, those tales were wildly off.”

“After all… the split of the Vanished Fleet was a major event a century ago, and what happened after that isn’t something ordinary people can find out,” Lucretia said, shaking her head with a complicated look. “They only know that the Radiant Star and the Sea Mist went their separate ways, almost to opposite ends of the civilized world. So of course they imagine… a whole big drama.”

As she spoke, Lucretia gave a small, helpless shake of her head.

“After you… left, my brother and I met a few times for short visits. By then the Vanished had completely disappeared from the Mortal Realm, but we could still feel that you were… ‘alive’.”

She looked out the window, speaking softly, as if to herself, about things no outsider could ever know.

“Near the borders, at nightfall, on the routes you once explored, as soon as our minds relaxed a little, we would ‘hear’ your voice. Mindless roars, full of malice and a desire to destroy, came again and again from the depths of the world, as if struggling to rise and tear open the barrier between the Mortal Realm and the Subspace…

“Several times we even saw you and the Vanished in the dim light between day and night. That ship rose from the darkness and closed in on us like Doomsday itself. Wherever it passed, there was only death.

“Later we found that only we could see that scene. It existed only in our sight and in our thoughts.

“After that, my brother summed up some patterns. He discovered that it was exactly because of ‘us’ that your ‘gaze’ was drawn here. The closer Tyrian and I were to each other, the stronger that pull became… Do you know? It was like lamps. Two lamps together shine brighter, and Tyrian and I were the ‘lighthouse’ for you to return from the Subspace to the Mortal Realm…

“So we split up, farther and farther. Tyrian went to the northern border, and I kept sailing south. When we were half a world apart, we finally stopped seeing your phantom. When we went even farther… we finally stopped hearing your roar.”

Lucretia let out a soft breath, as if a heavy weight had dropped from her shoulders. Those words had been held in for a century and had finally come out in one long rush.

Duncan listened quietly at her side, not knowing what to say. He knew that the “Witch” was really mourning and speaking about another person. He did not have to feel any burden from her story, did not have to feel regret or guilt. Yet for some reason, he found it hard to remain unmoved. Feelings rose in his heart that he was not sure even belonged to him. After a long silence, he could only give a quiet sigh: “You two have had a hard time.”

“Honestly… it wasn’t that bad,” Lucretia said with a small smile, shaking her head. “In the first ten years, we missed you very much. Hearing those voices and seeing those visions even made us think unrealistic thoughts. We wondered if, when you followed the ‘light’ back to the Mortal Realm, maybe everything could still be fixed.

“In the next ten years, the terrible disasters caused by the Vanished drawing near the Mortal Realm again and again grew more and more common. We began to feel afraid. Along with a feeling that may or may not count as ‘responsibility’, my brother and I started looking for a way to truly and completely banish you.

“A few years later, our ‘banishment’ seemed to start working. As fear faded, longing kept rising again. My brother would sometimes bring up the old days. We were very careful not to mention your name or the Vanished, yet we could not stop ourselves from talking about those great routes and those unforgettable voyages…

“By the most recent thirty or forty years, we had already gone through everything we could talk about. We slowly stopped bringing up the Vanished at all. It felt as if everything had finally passed. In most city-states’ official documents and in the captains’ sailing records, the Vanished had become just a ‘historical term’, a legend. Along with that, people’s fear of the Sea Mist and the Radiant Star seemed to fade a lot.

“And then you appeared. The White Oak fled from the storm and brought terrible news to the city-state of Pland… Did you know? Tyrian didn’t sleep well for three whole days after he got that news.”

She suddenly laughed. It seemed she had not laughed this freely in a hundred years.

At the ends of her hair, the silver?white ornament shaped like waves and feathers swayed with her smile, shining with warm light.

Duncan let out a soft sigh.

But just as he was about to speak, a scream suddenly rang out from the direction of the living room, cutting off his conversation with Lucretia.

It sounded like Nina’s voice.

Duncan and Lucretia quickly exchanged a look, then turned and ran toward the living room.

Halfway there, they heard Nina’s voice, full of shock and anger—

“Why! Would they! Put stinky beans! On pancakes-”