Chapter 588

Chapter 588: giants

Vanna tensed her muscles and nerves at once, watching the tall figure that slowly emerged from the dusty haze with full alert. If anything looked even a little wrong, she was ready to leap forward and chop down at him.

But from within the wind and dust came only a calm and reasonable voice: “Ah… a traveler. I don’t think I’ve seen a stranger appear here for many years.”

Vanna froze for a moment. Then she saw that giant-like figure walk out of the dust.

He stood at least four or five meters tall, so tall that Vanna had to tilt her head back as far as she could just to see the giant’s face. A dark, ragged robe wrapped around his body. It seemed that the robe had once been a fine, splendid garment, but now it was nothing but worn, tattered cloth that had endured countless years. The giant’s body was thin and gaunt, as if a long journey had worn him down to almost bare bones—yet that skinny hand still gripped a staff so huge it almost looked ridiculous.

Even in the giant’s hand, the long staff looked far too heavy and massive. Its shaft was like a straight tree trunk with jointed segments, and the top of the staff swelled like a bloated stone, its outline rough and barely carved. On the surface of the staff, Vanna could see countless dense, complicated, mysterious markings, covering the entire Gatekeeper’s cane.

Vanna’s gaze was drawn to the Gatekeeper’s cane against her will. It did not look like a tool meant to help with travel. It looked more like an astonishing weapon, or some ritual object with a heavy symbolic meaning. This made her feel, instinctively… a pressure that was almost reverence.

But soon, her attention left the Gatekeeper’s cane and returned to the giant.

The giant bent down slightly toward her, and that weathered face turned a gentle divine gaze in her direction. The giant’s face did not look like that of humans. He also had clear features, but the lines of those features were too hard and sharp, like stone that had been carved. His eyes shone with a murky brownish yellow, and it seemed as if flames flickered deep inside his eyeballs. Every glance seemed to bring crushing pressure.

“Traveler, where did you come from?” the giant asked.

When he spoke, even the wind and sand around them seemed stirred by an invisible force. Turbulent air currents swirled around Vanna, yet not a single grain of sand or dust landed on her.

Vanna forced herself to control her heartbeat and her expression. In the depths of her mind, she quickly reported this shocking situation to the captain, while she also chose her words and thought carefully before she answered the giant: “I come from outside this desert, very far from here. I don’t even know why I ended up in this place. May I ask… who are you?”

“Oh, outside the desert… Now this place has become a desert,” the giant said slowly, nodding his head. He did not answer Vanna’s question. Instead, his tone carried a sigh. “You are… very interesting, traveler. You’re not quite the same as the humans in my memory, but I’m not sure if I remember wrongly—after all, it has been a very, very long time since I last saw a stranger.”

Not quite the same as the humans in his memory?

Vanna’s heart gave a sudden jolt when she heard this. Right after that, she thought of the way she was “different” compared with an ordinary person.

Had this mysterious giant seen that she had once received a Subspace divine blessing and been “brought back to life”?

But before she could think it through, the giant spoke again: “Traveler, you said you came from far away. How far? Did you cross space, or time?”

Vanna was stunned for a moment.

What did that question… even mean?!

She stared up at the giant’s murky, burning eyes in shock. “I… don’t really understand what you mean.”

“…Then just pretend you didn’t hear it, traveler. Maybe the starting point of a journey no longer matters. The end doesn’t matter either,” the giant said, shaking his head. But then he suddenly seemed to notice something, and looked at Vanna with curiosity. “Are you talking with someone else?”

Vanna, who had been reporting to the captain in the depths of her mind, stopped at once. Although she controlled the expression on her face right away, she knew that the change in her eyes might not have escaped the giant’s notice.

Yet the giant sounded as if he had only asked casually, and did not seem to truly care. He shook his head. “It’s fine if you don’t want to say. Everyone has their own secrets.”

Vanna steadied herself, kept control of every change in her expression, and watched the mysterious giant’s every move. At the same time, she carefully asked again: “Who are you?”

“You’re asking for my name? Let me think…” This time, the giant finally answered her question. But after a brief moment of thought, the giant shook his head. “It’s been too long. I don’t remember… It really has been too long.”

He lowered his gaze to look at Vanna. Wrinkles, like carved lines, slowly gathered on his thin face. “You know, traveler, when there are no other voices left in the whole world, a ‘name’ becomes a meaningless idea. No one else needs to remember you, and you don’t need to introduce yourself to anyone. You slowly forget it, just like you are slowly forgotten by the world…”

He paused, as if he had suddenly fallen into some old memory. Only after a long time did he snap out of it, his voice low: “But besides my name, I do remember a few other things, if you think they matter… Long, long ago, they said I was this world’s deity. Back then, this place was not like this.”

The chaotic wind slowly faded. The drifting dust in the air also settled at some unknown moment. In this boundless sea of sand, the giant and the lost traveler stared at each other.

He had said he once was a deity.

Vanna’s eyes widened. Among all her guesses about the identity of this mysterious giant, none had included this “answer.” For a moment, she did not know how to react. Then she felt a kind of absurd contradiction.

As a follower of the storm goddess Gamona, as the Saint of the Deep Sea Church, one of the four churches of the True Gods, she had run into a giant who claimed to be a deity, deep inside the layered dream of the Nameless One. In theory… she should rise up to fight at once and destroy this self-proclaimed god, fulfilling her duty as an Inquisitor.

But Vanna was no longer the reckless person who had once dared to leap and chop at Captain Duncan the first time she saw him. On the Vanished, she had learned to face unbelievable things with a more rational attitude.

“You are a deity?” Vanna stayed tense as she asked carefully, “Who are the ‘they’ you mentioned? And what exactly is this place?”

“They once lived here,” the giant said, seemingly unaware of Vanna’s sudden wariness. He simply lifted a hand and pointed with his staff toward the endless sea of sand. “But that seems to have been a very, very long time ago… Or maybe it hasn’t been that long?”

The giant stopped, looking a bit puzzled. He stared at the staff in his hand and only after a while did he slowly shake his head. “Time… turned into something I didn’t recognize. In one instant it was stretched out to nearly infinite, and then it was squeezed back again. I can no longer tell when it all happened. I only remember that this used to be the most prosperous heart of the kingdom. The yellow sand under your feet used to be forests and rich soil stretching for thousands of miles. Huge canals crossed the fields, bringing rivers from the plateau over the hills. I watched them build pure white cities here. High walls linked the mountains, and tall towers rose straight out of the jungle. Bright fire lit up the night sky… I remember it was very beautiful.”

The giant spoke slowly. It seemed that he had not talked with anyone for too long and was no longer used to organizing his words as he spoke, so his sentences sounded a bit jumbled, like muttering in a dream. Vanna could only do her best to keep up with his story, to understand and guess at the information hidden in his words, and to imagine how this desert had once looked in some distant past.

Then the giant suddenly stopped again. He lowered his head to look at Vanna and asked curiously: “And what about you? Traveler, who are you? Do you have a name?”

Vanna pressed her lips together without thinking. She held back her first impulse to answer.

She could not recklessly reveal her name to an unknown being—especially when that being called himself a “deity” and was very likely a powerful higher extraordinary.

Maybe the giant had no ill will, but an extraordinary being strong enough could affect a mortal’s fate without any deliberate malice at all. Since becoming the captain’s follower, Vanna understood this more deeply than ever.

After a brief moment of hesitation, she answered carefully: “My name is Vanessa. I don’t have any special status. I’m just someone who accidentally lost her way and ended up here.”

“Vanessa…” the giant murmured softly, then shook his head. “That’s not your name.”

Vanna felt her heart suddenly race.

But the giant waved his hand right after: “But it doesn’t matter. Like I said, everyone has secrets. If you’re not willing to reveal your name, then I’ll just keep calling you ‘traveler’—there is no one else here anyway, so we won’t mistake each other.”

Vanna was silent for a moment. After that brief awkwardness, she nodded.

“Traveler,” the giant went on, “where are you going?”

Vanna hesitated, then looked up at the distant silhouettes that looked like the ruins of a city.

“Let’s go together,” the giant said, noticing where she was looking. He made a friendly offer. “I don’t remember those distant things very well anymore, but we can walk together for a while. I still have some impression of this world.”

Vanna did not answer at once, as if she were waiting for something.

A moment later, the captain’s order came from the depths of her mind—

“Accept his invitation.”

“All right,” Vanna nodded and looked up at the giant who claimed to be a deity. “It’s an honor to travel with you.”