Chapter 558

Chapter 558: All That They Left Behind

In that final moment, a sharp, icy gleam appeared deep in the boundless void and chaos. The tide of shattered information surged in like a flood and almost drowned the tiny flame that had seeped into the “sample”.

In his brief daze, Duncan heard Shirley beside him cry out: “Careful!”

His drifting awareness overlapped once more with the Mortal Realm. Duncan instinctively stepped half a pace back. The next second, he saw the tip of a sword, flashing with silver light, appear before his eyes.

The tip stopped only ten centimeters from his nose, and it was still slowly extending forward.

“Hostile action!” Ted Riel, who had been staring fixedly at the containment sample, reacted at once. He gave a low shout and quickly slapped the heavy book in his hands. A hazy radiance spilled out from the pages, spread over the surface of the sample, and in an instant condensed and thickened into layer after layer of barriers.

At the same time, Duncan drew back the flame that had seeped into the sample. His mind cleared quickly, and his gaze returned to the “sample” in front of him.

On the containment platform, the lump of iron-gray metal that had been frozen solid suddenly changed shape. Part of its “shell” bulged up in an instant and condensed into something like a sharp sword.

But that suddenly formed “sword” did not pierce anyone. It had only come out halfway when some immense force seemed to yank it back. Even now it was still stretching outward a little at a time. Rather than say it had “stabbed” out, it looked more as if a sword was being slowly “pushed” out of the sample.

At some point, a small conductor’s baton had appeared in Lucretia’s hand. She strode forward two quick steps. While Ted Riel held the sample in check with divine magic, she tapped the baton against the middle of that “long sword”. But just as she was about to destroy that structure further, Duncan suddenly stopped her: “Wait.”

Lucretia forcibly halted the spell she was about to unleash and turned, puzzled, to look at her Father. Ted Riel, who had been about to take the next step, and Nina, who was already almost igniting, also hurriedly stopped and looked over in confusion.

Duncan waved a hand at them. Then he carefully skirted around the still-slowly extending blade and came to the side of the iron-gray “living metal”. He stared fixedly at its “shell”.

It had not truly “come alive”. Only the portion forming the sword blade was changing and stretching outward. The rest of the sample remained as still and frozen as before.

The chaotic, broken information was still swirling in his mind, as if someone had torn a person’s memories into pieces, mixed them together at random, and then dumped them all in front of him at once. Duncan kept sorting through those shattered memories again and again, trying to reassemble them into useful knowledge.

He saw many things—an ominous Deep Crimson, scars that cut across the sky, warriors setting out, companions falling one by one, a world that slowly twisted and rotted, a journey that had no real meaning, vast confusion, anger, fear, the death and calm that followed, and the strange, shifting scenes that kept surfacing amid Mental Derangement.

Duncan suspected that if any other ordinary person saw these things—even only a small part of them—they would be completely consumed by the dangerous knowledge hidden in that information and fall into utter corruption.

But to him, that corrupting “knowledge” was only a pile of chaotic fragments. As he sorted and recalled them again and again, he had already begun to piece them into a continuous memory.

Then he raised his head and looked at the long sword that had already extended more than halfway out. After a slight hesitation, he reached out and touched its surface with a fingertip.

The chill, solid feel of metal came through his fingertip.

Duncan slowly closed his eyes. When he touched the sword, he could feel those shattered memories in his mind become a little clearer and more continuous. They were still incomplete, but they were enough for him to understand what had happened.

He opened his eyes and looked at the last fragment left behind by that distant, ancient world, at the final strike that nameless warrior had launched against Doomsday. He pinched the fragment gently between his fingers, feeling the link it passed to him, and slowly drew it out.

The flame had given this long sword, which had never managed to fly into the sky, a touch of extra strength. At last it came free from the living metal completely.

It was finely made, with a long, slender blade. The hilt was wrapped in fine linen, and bright crystals of unknown use and material were set into the guard. Now, after crossing a span of ages, it had arrived in this Deep Sea era in its original and “correct” form.

Everyone in the room, Ted Riel included, stared wide-eyed at the scene before them. Lucretia finally could not hold back and asked: “Dad, what is this?”

Duncan lowered his head and looked at the Nameless Sword in his hand. After thinking for a long time, he slowly said: “This was a weapon once meant to fight the world’s Doomsday.”

“To fight the world’s Doomsday?” Shirley’s eyes widened at once. “With a sword? Is this one of those artifacts from legends that can split the sea? The kind blessed by the Four Gods?”

Duncan shook his head: “It’s only a sword—the best sword they had. It’s very sharp, but even pushed to its limit, it could only kill larger beasts or armed humans… That was already the best they could do.”

Lucretia and Ted Riel looked at each other, unable to understand. Nina, however, vaguely understood and quickly asked: “What did you see?”

Duncan was still sorting through the messy, broken memories in his mind, but after a brief pause he still broke the silence: “Just some fragments, things that happened a very, very long time ago…”

He described what he had seen, using words as simple as he could.

He did not speak quickly, because there were too many missing pieces and too much information that even he did not fully understand. He had to find a way to fill in the parts that did not connect at all, or to explain concepts that were hard for Nina and the others to grasp.

For the first time, he tried to explain to people of this world what a “planet” was. After his last talk with Alice, he had finally decided to give it a try.

But to explain one strange idea, he needed ten more basic points of knowledge. Every strange point needed even more knowledge to support it. On top of that, there were countless things that were totally against common sense and instinct for people of this world. Even if he explained all of it clearly, no one could truly picture it and piece it together in their mind.

Ted Riel and Lucretia struggled to understand, and the questions they kept throwing out made the explanation take longer and longer. In the end, Duncan realized that if he wanted to explain all the basic concepts clearly, he would need at least half a year of full-time lessons to manage it.

So he could only skim over many things, or use metaphors to patch the gaps in knowledge and ideas for now.

In the end, despite all his effort, Nina and the others clearly could only grasp part of it. But at least this time, they more or less understood what had happened.

Shirley was still lost in the shock of that long “story”. Nina was still thinking about the strange words Duncan had just mentioned. The two scholars present—Lucretia and Ted Riel—had dark, heavy expressions. It was clear they had already thought of many things.

“The world’s Doomsday…” Ted Riel murmured under his breath. “If what you saw really points to a world’s Doomsday, then when did it happen…”

“Before the Great Annihilation,” Duncan confirmed the question the other man had not spoken aloud. Then he raised the sword in his hand. “The black wall that has stood before historians for so long now has a crack in it. This sword… might be the first thing we can confirm that was passed from before the time node of the Great Annihilation into this Deep Sea era.”

“A historic moment… just like that.” Ted Riel let out a long, complicated sigh. Faced with news that could shake the whole academic world, his mind only felt like chaos. A flood of sudden information was battering at the system of knowledge he had built over many years and even at his understanding of this world. In spite of himself, he called in his heart for Rahm’s benediction and laid mental wards and suggestions on himself to keep his reason from being damaged.

After a long, silent period of thought, Lucretia suddenly raised her head and met Duncan’s eyes: “You mentioned many strange ideas just now. Are those… the things you said before would be hard to explain to me?”

“They’re only a small part. A very, very small part,” Duncan said quietly. “I should have told you some of this earlier.”

Lucretia only shook her head lightly. She did not complain, and she did not ask why her Father was willing to explain these things now. If Father did this, he must have his reasons. When he was ready to speak, he would speak.

She was only a little curious about how her Father knew such unbelievable things.

Did that knowledge… come from Subspace?

On the other side, after a long stretch of thought, Ted Riel suddenly realized something.

“According to what you ‘saw’, under the influence of that ‘red light’, the world was swallowed by lava, the land was torn apart, and everyone died… Then how did the Deep Sea era begin?”

He raised his hand and chopped downward with his palm, as if marking a fault in the ground.

“There’s a gap here, Captain Duncan. After that world was destroyed and before the Deep Sea era began, there should have been some process of change. The world you saw does not match any race, any place, or any legend in the Deep Sea era…”

“Indeed, it doesn’t match,” Duncan said with a light nod. His gaze fell on the “sample” sitting on the platform. After a long silence, he finally spoke out a guess he had held in his heart for a long time. “So… that world did not pass down much, unlike the worlds of humans, elves, and Senkin. What we see before us is already all that remains of that world.”

“‘That world’…” Ted Riel and Lucretia traded a quick look. In that moment, they finally grasped what Duncan meant.

And in Duncan’s mind, the “Moon” of his homeland rose once more before his inner eye.

Along with it came the words Alice had once said to him with a laugh—

“Captain, is this a riddle?”

The expression on Duncan’s face shifted slightly. The muscles at the corner of his mouth trembled a few times, then finally settled into a smile that Nina and Lucretia could not understand.

“Yes, this really is a riddle…”

He spoke softly, in a voice only he could hear.