Chapter 561

Chapter 561: Those Who Walk in the Wilderness

Because of the delay that afternoon, it was already close to dusk and time for dinner when Shirley and Nina returned to 99 Crown Street.

In this Elven city, there really were not many things that could be called normal food. But at least normal ingredients were always available. Lucretia’s servants prepared a rich dinner for their guests, and Nina and Shirley finally ate food that “humans ought to eat”.

But they did not eat this meal with easy hearts.

Everything they had seen and heard in that underground containment facility still left them dizzy even now. There were too many things they did not understand, too many that broke their view of the world: the Great Annihilation, the “black wall” at the start of history, those Doomsdays, those destroyed Old Worlds, and this “New World” born in the Deep Sea era…

For two young ladies who, strictly speaking, were still just “big children”, all of this was a bit too complex and far ahead of them.

After they hurried through dinner, Shirley went back to her room. She sat in front of the table, dazing for a while, when she heard the soft clink of chains beside her. Dog poked his head out from the Shadows.

Shirley lowered her head and looked at this “friend” who had almost eaten her once but then raised her from childhood. She asked very seriously: “Did you understand what the Captain said today? About all those pieces of different worlds piled together and turning into the Deep Sea era and so on…”

“I understood part of it,” Dog said. He lay down and gently rubbed his huge skull against Shirley’s knee. “But I didn’t understand the parts that went too far beyond common sense either.”

“I barely understood any of it,” Shirley said honestly. “Of course, I understood the sentences, but asking me to picture how those things actually happened is a bit too hard for my brain. In the end, why do we have to care how this world was born anyway?”

She spoke in confusion. She knew she sounded very shallow, but she never had anything to hide in front of Dog.

“You can live just fine without knowing anything,” she went on. “Anyway, the two of us lived like that for more than ten years…”

Dog suddenly lifted his head. His hollow eye sockets, full of blood-red light, stared straight into Shirley’s eyes. A low, hoarse voice came from his skeletal body: “You can live without knowing anything. But we still have to know that this living is not something we can take for granted. It is like this for an ordinary person, and it is also like this for the world itself.”

Dog’s sudden serious tone startled Shirley. She froze for a moment, then seemed to faintly grasp something and showed a thoughtful look.

“The world will not ‘live’ like this forever,” Dog said. He watched Shirley’s reaction, then laid his head down again and spoke in a muffled tone. “The Great Annihilation could destroy those Old Worlds, so the Deep Sea era we live in now can also be ended by another power. Ordinary people may stay ignorant of this until the day the end arrives. They will greet The End in a long dream of peace, like the people back in that Warrior’s homeland, those citizens waiting in their kingdom for the heroes to return. Their ‘ignorance’ was their greatest divine blessing. For them, not knowing anything is enough to live, because they do not know how close death is.

“But Shirley, we are not the people who stayed in the kingdom—we are on the Vanished.

“You have seen those prophetic visions too. The Black Sun that descended on Pland. The Creator’s Blueprint that fell into a runaway state deep under Frostholm. The Boundless Sea when Vision 001 went dark. And those mumbling cultists… If you were someone ‘living in the kingdom’, you would never come into contact with these things.”

Dog rambled on. He shook his head, carefully hid away his fangs, and nudged Shirley’s knee with the tip of his nose.

“Shirley, you really can live without knowing anything. But now you already know. The Captain is worried about those ominous prophetic visions, and in fact, you are too. You just haven’t noticed it yourself.”

Shirley fell quiet. She sat still in the chair for a long time before reaching out to rest her hand on Dog’s skull. Her voice held a little unease: “Dog, are we people walking in the wilderness… like that Warrior? Are we also trudging toward Doomsday?”

“We walk toward Doomsday, and Doomsday walks toward us. ‘Awareness’ goes both ways,” Dog said. “When we know it exists, there is no difference between the two. The only question is… in what way and at what time it will catch up with us. I think this is also what the Captain is worried about.”

“…Dog, how do you understand this so well? This… feeling?”

The blood-red light in Dog’s eye sockets slowly dimmed and brightened: “Because I once felt something similar. When you were very, very small.”

He lifted his head and looked into Shirley’s eyes.

His voice was very soft, just like many years ago, when he tried to calm a frightened little girl to sleep on a stormy night—

“At the very beginning, you were a little creature I could not understand at all. You were so small, so weak. Your arms looked like thin sticks that could be broken with ease. Even though you had a symbiotic pact with a demon, you seemed so fragile that you could die at any moment…

“Every day, every second, I worried that this ‘death’ would come. I did not understand your breathing. I did not understand your heartbeat. I did not know how humans stayed alive. I only learned that you needed to look for food after you went hungry for several days. As a Abyssal demon, I was not yet used to ‘thinking’ about things back then, and you also… did not talk to me much at that time.

“So I always felt that you might die at any time, anywhere, because of something I still could not understand. Your breathing, your heartbeat, the flow of your blood—these strange ‘phenomena’ were, in my eyes, very fragile ‘temporary balances’. If any link stopped, you would leave me. That is why, when you woke up as a child, you always saw me feeling around and watching by your side. I had to check your breathing and heartbeat, to see whether you had already died.

“That worry is very similar to what the Captain feels now.”

Dog paused for a moment. He raised his head to look toward the second floor, then quickly drew his gaze back.

“I cannot compare myself with the Captain, and I should not guess at his thoughts. But today, in his eyes, I felt that same familiar… worry. This Boundless Sea that looks so vast is, to him, probably like you were to me many years ago—a small and weak ‘strange thing’. He does not know how it survives. He only knows it could die at any time.”

Dog had rambled for a long time and finally grew quiet. But Shirley still stared at him blankly for a long time without making a sound.

“Why aren’t you saying anything?” Dog asked in confusion.

“You never… told me any of this before,” Shirley said, a little dazed. “So when I was little…”

“It’s all in the past,” Dog said softly. “You survived. So all those worries and hardships back then are all ‘past’ now.”

Shirley pressed her lips together. She suddenly lifted her head in some worry and looked toward the second floor: “Dog, do you think… we’ll become like the Warrior and his companions in the story?”

“If I can choose, I don’t want us to be like them,” Dog said, shaking his head. “The Warrior could not stop the world’s Doomsday with just a steel sword. His hard march toward Doomsday was doomed to fail. But since it is the Captain leading us, we clearly have more than just a steel sword. So I am willing to be a bit more hopeful.”

“The Captain…” Shirley sighed. “I don’t even know what the Captain is doing right now… He didn’t even come down for dinner.”

“Are you going to bring him some food later and take a look at him?”

“Uh, better not—Alice will definitely go anyway.”

“That’s true.”

…

Looking out at the strange sky where daylight faded and the light dimmed, yet a faint layer of golden “sunlight” always filled the gaps between the tall buildings, Duncan let out a quiet breath and turned to switch on the room’s electric light.

Although that “sunlight” spreading through the streets gave Lightwind Harbor eternal “illumination”, after Vision 001 fell, the sunlight that spread over from the nearby sea and was blocked layer after layer by buildings could not light up the whole city. Deep inside the city-state, in places where the “sunlight” was blocked by rows of buildings, night could still be seen. There, people still needed the comfort of lamps.

The bright light drove back the gloom seeping in from all sides and seemed to add a bit of warmth to the room.

Outside the window, as Vision 001’s power faded, the pale crack of World’s Wound slowly appeared in the starless, moonless sky.

Its cold, pale glow spread through the night, yet was sliced into pieces by the “sunlight” lingering between the tall buildings. It formed a strange scene that no other city-state could see: World’s Wound and the sunlight appearing at the same time and crossing over each other.

Duncan stared at that gash-like “wound” in the sky, but in his mind he was still recalling the “memory visions” he had seen today.

He thought of that Deep Crimson that stretched across the sky like a huge scar.

What was that red light that spanned outer space and seemed to break the normal rules of physics?

That red light showed up no matter where he looked: in the vision of the New Hope’s crash, in the oil painting in Alice’s mansion, and in the Warrior’s homeland as it neared destruction.

There was no doubt that this red light was what scholars had been desperately searching for—the prime culprit that caused the Great Annihilation events, or at least the first sign of the Great Annihilation.

Letting his gaze rest on World’s Wound, which also stretched across the sky, Duncan could not help but form a string of baseless “connections” in his heart—

Every Old World’s destruction was accompanied by that huge red light. In the New World’s Deep Sea era, the pale World’s Wound hung high in the sky… Could there be some link between the two?

Was the World’s Wound that shone over the night sky of the Boundless Sea an echo from an Old World’s Doomsday? Or the remnant of that destructive power from the time of the Great Annihilation?

Duncan even had a more disturbing guess—

Had that destructive power never faded at all? Had it only gone into some kind of sleep, hanging over the world every night, and the so-called World’s Wound was… only the form that “red light” took while it slept?

Could Vision 001’s role be to periodically “hypnotize” that Doomsday Deep Crimson?

As this chain of guesses ran through his mind, Duncan’s gaze grew more and more grave. Another question he had never thought of before suddenly surfaced in his heart.

In his own homeland, at least in the homeland of his memories… he had never seen that “red light”.