Chapter 568

Chapter 568: A Large-Scale Otherworld?

The living room on the first floor was utterly silent, as quiet as the whole street outside. Everything still looked the way it had at nightfall, and the puppets and tin-man servants powered by clockwork and magic mechanisms stood quietly in every corner. It seemed that right up to the second before the “abnormality” appeared, they had still been carrying out their programmed cleaning orders.

Duncan led a very nervous Alice down the stairs. His gaze swept over the silent living room in the dim light. Their footsteps echoed in the dead stillness, making everything feel even more eerie.

Alice carefully clutched the captain’s clothes with one hand while turning her head to look to the side. A puppet shaped like a maid stood not far away, one hand resting on the stair rail. A moment ago this puppet had seemed to be polishing the banister. She still kept her upper body slightly bent forward, with a bucket at her feet. But like the other servants, she had gone still, and the ticking and gear-grinding sounds inside her no longer came.

Alice kept feeling that the puppet would suddenly turn its eyes toward her, just like in so many horror stories. The thought made her heart jump into her throat.

“So scary…” she muttered behind the captain. “There are dolls everywhere… They were fine in the daytime, but now they suddenly all stopped moving, it’s really scary… But if they suddenly started moving again, that would be even scarier…”

Duncan silently turned his head and gave this silly doll a very strange look.

However, Alice did not notice at all, and did not feel she had said anything wrong.

Duncan shook his head and turned his attention back to the marks he had left on Morris, Vanna, and the others.

Those marks still shone in his senses, but their state was extremely strange. Sometimes he felt that the marks were clearly inside this house, even right beside him. The next second, they would suddenly appear very far away, like on the other side of the city-state. It was as if they were randomly teleporting.

This was the first time Duncan had seen anything like this.

He tried again to call to those distant marks directly in the spiritual world, to contact Nina and the others through them. But since he could never pin down the marks’ exact position and state, each attempt failed. At best he got a faint and meaningless “response” for a moment. That too was something he had never encountered before.

The good news was that he seemed to be slowly grasping the pattern of the marks’ strange state. Even if he could not locate them exactly, after some time to adjust he should still be able to link to them accurately. And on the other hand, as long as the marks were still there, he could be sure that the people carrying them were at least not in mortal danger, so there was no need to panic yet.

Duncan walked forward slowly while sensing and getting used to the distant marks’ condition. Just then, a faint clicking sound suddenly rang out in the living room, cutting off his and Alice’s movements at once.

Duncan snapped his head around toward the source of the sound.

The puppet maid that had been standing by the stair rail began to move bit by bit in the dark. Like a long-rusted machine, she stiffly turned her head. Her lifeless eyes slowly searched the living room for something.

For a moment Alice felt as if her head was going to pop off from fright: “Waaah! It really started moving!”

Duncan finally could not hold back: “You are a living doll yourself, so why are you scared of this?”

Alice froze for a second before she finally reacted: “Ah… right?”

Duncan ignored the embarrassing simpleton and turned his gaze to the puppet maid that was moving so stiffly. He looked especially calm, because from that puppet he already sensed a suddenly descended, familiar aura.

“Lucy? Is that you?” he asked, testing.

“Ah, you really are nearby…” The puppet finally focused her gaze accurately on Duncan. She worked her jaw, and a stiff, distorted voice came out: “But I still can’t see you. The quality of this temporary ‘medium’ is just awful. I really shouldn’t have skimped when I bought the housework doll. Long story short, how are things on your side? I sensed your call several times just now, but it always cut off instantly before I could answer…”

“Everything is fine here. It’s just that the house is completely empty and all of you are gone,” Duncan said at once. He briefly described the current situation on the street. “…That’s it. In short, from where I stand it looks like something went wrong on your side, while Alice and I were not affected.”

“It does seem that way,” after a few seconds’ delay, Lucretia’s voice came again from the puppet maid’s mouth. “The ones in trouble are probably us. You are still in the Mortal Realm, only seeing the Anomaly that has appeared in the Mortal Realm. We… seem to have been dragged into the ‘inside’ of this Anomaly.”

“Are the others with you?” Duncan asked at once.

“No, it’s just me here. It looks like we have been scattered all over the place.”

“What’s around you?” Duncan asked again.

“Around me? Trees, vines, green that stretches out of sight. A forest,” Lucretia answered. “It looks very much like the forest we saw before in Taran Ael’s dream, but the atmosphere feels… not quite the same.”

…

The forest was shrouded in a dusk-like light. A strange, slightly gloomy sense of chaos seemed to wrap the whole world. The sunlight that filtered down through the layers of leaves between the crowns was dim and heavy, unable to dispel the gloom among the dense trees.

From far away there came now and then the cries of birds and beasts, or the sound of branches snapping. Other than that there were no obvious oddities, yet Lucretia, standing there, felt as if she could smell a strange… tension in the forest air.

It felt as if something was about to happen here.

She gripped a short wand in one hand, a wand that looked like a conductor’s baton. At the same time she maintained her link with a certain puppet she had made herself, and through it she reported to her distant Father what was happening here: “…There is a tense feeling all through the forest. It is oppressive and even carries an invisible fear. Yes, it is an emotion. As a witch, I can sense the ‘emotions’ drifting in the air. This place looks very similar to that dream of Taran Ael’s, but the sky has no invading Sun spawn, and it seems there is something else deep in the forest… I am heading in that direction.

“The street blocks? I can’t see them from here. Everywhere within my sight is trees. The view is limited in this dense forest, but I’m sure it covers far more than one or two blocks. The range of this ‘otherworld’ is very large. What you see ‘over there’ should only be a small portion of it leaking into the Mortal Realm.”

Lucretia suddenly stopped. She listened carefully to the voice from far away, then nodded lightly a moment later: “Yes, I also suspect this is still that ‘dream’ – the one those Annihilators called the ‘Nameless One’s Dream’. But things are different from last time. Last time we entered the Nameless One’s Dream by using Taran Ael as a stepping stone. The information you got from those cultists said the same: to enter this dream, you must use an elf’s mind as a bridge. But this time everything happened so suddenly and strangely…”

She paused, then raised her wand and lightly tapped a vine in front of her. The vine immediately came to life, squirming as it grew forward and stretched out like a bridge across a deep gully ahead.

Lucretia walked forward along this vine bridge and went on: “…I still haven’t found that ‘bridge’, haven’t found who the Dreamer is. But according to the rules of dreams, I should already be very close to the Dreamer right now.”

She suddenly stopped.

Rustling footsteps appeared nearby. The sound came very abruptly, as if there had been no one there a second before, and then a person had just appeared out of thin air, stepping on dead branches and fallen leaves as they walked this way.

Lucretia focused at once. Before she even turned around she cast several protective spells on herself. Then she gripped her wand with one hand and looked toward the source of the sound.

But what appeared before her was neither a cultist invading the dream nor a twisted entity born from the dream.

A strange elf woman stood in the shade of a tree not far away, staring over with surprise and caution.

Lucretia’s first thought was of the Dreamer who served as the “bridge” in this dream. But soon she realized what felt off about the strange elf in the distance. The woman wore a suit of light armor whose style did not match any city-state or era Lucretia knew. Pale-gold hair fell over her shoulders, braided with strange strands that glowed faint blue. In her hands she held a peculiar weapon like a mix of a spear and a poleaxe. Lucretia had never seen such gear in Lightwind Harbor, or anywhere else in the world.

While Lucretia was still in a daze, the elf woman with the long-handled weapon had already spoken in a stern, wary voice:

“Did you not receive the order to evacuate? Why are you still outside the Wall of Silence?”

Lucretia narrowed her eyes a little.

The situation… seemed to have become delicate.

…

Between the buildings, the “sunlight” and the cold glow from the World’s Wound crossed and mingled. In this eerie night that belonged only to Lightwind Harbor, Duncan and Alice hurried across the street.

Alice was holding a puppet’s head in her arms. Its mouth kept opening and closing.

Lucretia’s voice came from the puppet head’s mouth, reporting the latest progress “over there”:

“I’m moving together with this strange elf who suddenly appeared. She seems completely unaware that I’m not the same race as she is, and she lowered her guard very quickly… We’re heading for a place called the ‘Wall of Silence’…”

This scene was as strange as it could possibly be. A living doll was running in the veil of night, clutching another doll’s head in her arms. That head kept talking, its voice hoarse and distorted by its material. If any normal, sane person saw this, their sanity would probably drop on the spot.

However, Alice felt nothing odd about it at all.

She jogged along behind Duncan, and her expression even looked a little happy.

She was probably used to running around with a head in her arms… used to holding her own, so holding someone else’s was no different.