Chapter 59

Chapter 59: .

Duncan and Alice stood at the end of the staircase leading to the bilge and faced a bizarre, chilling sight. The entire bottom of the Vanished lay in a shattered state, and beyond the broken hull stretched a kind of void filled with endless, dim light.

Was this the Vanished’s true “bilge structure”? And what was that thing outside this shattered hull?

Could such a scene really exist beneath the surface of the Boundless Sea?

Duncan walked forward carefully, taking two steps into the broken cabin. He stepped onto the largest fragment of planking and looked back in the direction he had come from.

The “last door” still stood quietly where it had been, fixed onto a floating plank. Behind it lay a dark staircase slanting upward. Yet around the door, there were no walls that ought to be there. There was only emptiness.

The door floated alone in this space.

Duncan circled around to the back of the door with great care and found nothing there at all. Looking through the open doorway, he could directly see the broken cabin on the other side.

“Captain…” Alice’s nervous voice drifted over. The doll looked around in fright, then finally fixed her eyes on Duncan. “Th?this… this is normal, right?”

In truth, Duncan was even less sure than the doll. At least Alice could blindly place her trust in the captain. Where was this “captain” supposed to find confidence right now? But seeing Alice so on edge, and remembering those “crew member rules” Goathead had mentioned, Duncan forced down his unease and kept his usual calm, serious expression.

“Don’t worry,” he said lightly. “The Vanished is a ship beyond anything you can imagine.”

“Yes, yes, it really is beyond imagination…” Alice said in awe. Duncan’s steady manner clearly eased her a little. She started to look around with curiosity at the broken hull and the chaotic light outside. “Captain, out there… it doesn’t look like there’s water.”

Duncan thought for a moment, then looked at Alice with sudden interest: “Do you think that outside is below the surface of the Boundless Sea?”

Alice froze: “Huh? Why are you asking me?”

Duncan’s face stayed calm: “Because you have experience.”

“That’s only because you threw me…” Alice started to blurt out, but quickly swallowed the rest and answered honestly instead: “I don’t think so… The sea should be all water. No matter how wrong the Boundless Sea is, there still has to be water under the surface. But outside it looks just like… just like…”

“A void filled with chaotic streams of light,” Duncan finished as he shook his head and slowly walked forward. He came to the edge of the plank beneath his feet and looked down at the shifting lights outside the hull. “The bottom of the Vanished… is not inside the Boundless Sea.”

Alice stared: “Huh? Then where is it?”

Duncan did not answer. He tried to look mysterious—mainly because he did not know either.

But he still had a vague guess. Perhaps this ship was actually sailing through several different dimensions at the same time. On the surface, the Vanished looked as if it was sailing on the Boundless Sea of the Mortal Realm. In truth, different parts of the ship might belong to different dimensions altogether.

That would also explain why the deeper he went into the Vanished, the more eerie and sinister the surrounding cabins became. Perhaps the truly eerie thing was not the cabins themselves…

If this dim, chaotic space outside the hull was not the Boundless Sea, then what was it? It did not look like the Spirit Realm, and it was not like the dark space he saw while crossing through the Spirit Realm either. Was it somewhere “deeper”? The Abyssal Deep? Subspace?

With countless guesses and ideas swirling in his mind, Duncan slowly drew the pirate sword from his waist. Holding the consecrated lantern in one hand and the long sword in the other, he carefully reached toward the edge of the fragment beneath his feet. He was extremely cautious now. Even though the gaps between the fragments looked small enough to jump across in a single step, he did not dare move blindly. He had to test them with the sword first.

Who knew if something might suddenly emerge from those fissures and swallow anyone who tried to cross?

A second later, his eyes widened slightly in surprise.

He saw the tip of the sword vanish. At the edge of the fragment across the gap, a piece of sword tip suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

Duncan frowned and tested in different directions. The same thing happened again and again.

He finally began to understand.

These areas that looked like cracks were actually still continuous in space. The bilge structure that seemed shattered to pieces was, in reality, still whole.

He straightened and looked around at the cracks and the flowing lights beyond them, a realization forming in his heart. The “fractured” scene was only a visual effect. It had not broken the true continuity of space. The hull of the Vanished was not really ruptured here. For some reason, the “view” outside the ship had simply appeared inside.

But what had caused that? Was it overlapping space? Or a flawed projection from a higher dimension down to a lower one?

Duncan instinctively searched through all the reliable and unreliable knowledge in his mind, trying to explain this strange phenomenon. Alice, meanwhile, watched the captain poke around at the edges of the cracks, sometimes shining the consecrated lantern everywhere, sometimes jabbing with the sword. After a long time, she finally could not hold back: “Captain… are you using a special soothing ritual to… calm the cabin?”

With his back to Alice, Duncan silently sheathed the sword and forced himself to say: “…Yes.”

“Oh! Amazing!” Alice’s eyes lit up at once. “Then are you going to perform a soothing ritual on all the fragments here?”

“…This is enough,” Duncan said stiffly, keeping his face stern. Then, before the curious doll could ask more questions, he quickly shifted her attention. “Let’s walk a bit farther ahead.”

As he spoke, he raised the consecrated lantern and carefully took a step forward. As he set his foot down, he tensed every muscle and nerve in his body, ready for anything that might happen as he crossed the crack. But nothing happened at all.

Just as when he had tested with the sword, he simply “skipped over” the process of crossing the gap. It was like walking in a normal cabin. He stepped straight onto the fragment on the other side.

Alice watched in amazement as the captain strode ahead, moving freely as if the cracks underfoot did not exist. She tried to copy him and followed. But when she reached the gap, she grew nervous again and, in the end, could not help speeding up and taking a leap…

And of course, she crashed head?first into Duncan’s back.

Duncan felt a sudden rush of air behind him, then something solid slammed into his back. His body reacted at once. He spun and swung up his arm—

The next second, he was looking with a blank expression at a headless doll behind him, flailing wildly with both hands. Alice’s head, several meters away, rolled along the planks while stammering: “So… so… sor…”

“Stay right here and don’t move. I’ll go get you,” Duncan sighed. As he hurried after Alice’s head, which was still rolling slowly away, he reflected inwardly on why he had brought this useless doll down here in the first place. He picked the head up with practiced ease. “Have you considered putting a screw in your neck?”

Alice’s head seemed not to hear the second half of his remark. Her eyes suddenly widened as she stared off to the side: “Th?th?there’s… a doo…”

Duncan frowned and looked in the direction indicated by Alice’s frantic gaze.

A pitch?black wooden door stood quietly on a fragment at the far end.

A door. There was another door. So there really was another door.

When he had seen the warning on the door at the foot of the stairs, Duncan had already wondered if this classic situation would happen. Yet when he now saw that this “bilge space” really did contain an extra door, his heart still gave a little jolt.

Just then Alice’s body stumbled up to them. Duncan handed the doll her head as he looked toward the door: “Was there a door over there just now?”

Alice popped her head back onto her neck with a little “pop”, rolled her shoulders, and glanced that way: “I don’t think so. It only showed up after we walked over.”

Duncan answered with a noncommittal hum and, holding the consecrated lantern, carefully walked toward the door.

In truth, he no longer needed the lantern’s light in this strange cabin. The chaotic glow seeping in from beyond the cracks, though dim, was enough to give the whole space a basic level of brightness. Even so, he kept the consecrated lantern in his hand at all times. It was a necessary precaution.

Goathead had never reminded him about anything like this, but Duncan had already decided: as long as he was in a cabin below the waterline, he would never let this lamp go out.

The new door looked ordinary. Its black boards were not much different from the “last door” at the foot of the stairs, and its style and material were similar to most of the doors used on the Vanished.

Duncan lifted his head. Above the frame of this door, he saw a line of letters, as if poured in copper and set into the wood:

“This door leads to the Vanished.”