Chapter 592

Chapter 592: Stone

After standing for a long time in front of this “room” made entirely of chaotic lines and blocks of color, Duncan turned his head a little and watched Goathead on the table from the corner of his eye.

From Goathead’s point of view, it should now also be able to see the scene inside the room. He wondered how Goathead would react after seeing this bizarre, disordered space.

But it had no reaction. It only kept using those emotionless, pitch-black eyes to calmly gaze in Duncan’s direction. When it made no sound, it was like a real block of wood.

Duncan turned back again. After a brief hesitation, he finally stepped toward the strange room built from tangled lines.

At the same time, he was ready. If anything went wrong, he would force his flames to rise, wake Atlantis, and break out of this “dream”.

But the worst he had imagined did not happen.

He stepped through the door. Faint ripples, clear and thin like water, spread across the entire chaotic room, then faded. Nothing else happened. The room did not collapse, and he himself did not seem affected by the twisted colors and lines.

Duncan walked deeper into the room and, as he passed, closed the door behind him. The unsettling, silent gaze of that strange Goathead on the table was finally blocked outside.

The tangled colored lines stretched out under his feet. Vaguely furniture-like shapes, sketched by those lines, surrounded him on every side. Duncan carefully watched everything in the room, feeling an extremely eerie atmosphere pressing in from all around. After a moment, his gaze finally settled on one corner of the “room”.

Several translucent colored lines trembled there. They linked together into a geometric outline. At the center of that shaking outline lay what looked like a flat, calm water surface that faintly reflected the surroundings.

Duncan walked up to that geometric frame and reached out, gently brushing the calm “water”. Strands of ghostly green flame spread across the surface. A moment later, the scene reflected there became clear—it turned into a mirror.

In the next second, shadows stirred at the center of the mirror, and Agatha’s figure quietly appeared within.

The lady in the mirror stared in shock at the chaotic, eerie place outside the glass.

“This… this is what was behind that door?!”

Duncan nodded slightly: “Yes. This is what is inside the door—the deepest part.”

“This place looks… so strange,” Agatha said, frowning hard. “How can it be like this?”

But Duncan seemed to have already understood a few things. He spoke calmly: “Because on the Vanished in the Mortal Realm, Goathead never dared look into the captain’s cabin. It doesn’t know what this room looks like.”

At least, it didn’t know what the cabin looked like after the “captain” moved in. Duncan did not say that part out loud.

Agatha instantly understood the deeper meaning in his words.

“You mean… this ‘Vanished’ really was ‘created’ by Goathead from the Mortal Realm?” she said quickly. “It turned the Vanished’s shadow into this ship sailing in darkness and fog, but it can’t restore the parts of the ship it doesn’t understand…”

As she spoke, Agatha suddenly frowned and shook her head. “But in the Mortal Realm, Goathead acts like it knows nothing about any of this. And how did it even do all this…”

“Maybe it really does know nothing,” Duncan said quietly, his gaze slowly sweeping the room. “Right now I have a bold guess: this ship might be one of its dreams.”

“Its dream?!” Agatha froze for a second, then seemed to think of something. Confusion appeared on her face. “But it clearly said it never dreams, it never even rests. And I saw it myself—the First Mate is always awake. Even last time, when the Nameless One’s dream appeared, it was still at the helm, just like always.”

“Because it doesn’t know it’s dreaming at all. It doesn’t even know it can dream. It might even…” Duncan stopped for a moment. An even bolder thought rose in his mind. He hesitated a few seconds, then spoke softly, almost to himself: “Maybe our First Mate has never woken up.”

When she realized what the captain’s words meant, Agatha’s eyes slowly widened.

After a brief silence, Duncan spoke again: “Then now there is only one last question left.”

Agatha repeated without thinking: “The last question?”

Duncan lifted his head and looked at the door standing amid the twisted lines. His gaze seemed to pass through the door toward the Goathead sitting on the table outside. After a long time, he murmured: “Saslokar is dead. Saslokar died a very, very long time ago…”

…

veil of night fell over the desert. It came so suddenly that everything around them dimmed at once. The sourceless glow that had filled the sky vanished in an instant, as if something had swallowed it. Quiet night spread over the sea of sand and the wide ruins buried in it.

Now, only a huge, unsettling dark red “crack” remained in the sky. The crack was like blood, its edges like fog. It covered the heavens and gave off a crushing pressure.

Even someone as strong-willed as Vanna, an Inquisitor, subconsciously avoided looking up at that “wound in the world”.

But the giant traveling with her seemed long used to all of this.

At the edge of the ruined city, they found a spot sheltered from wind and sand. It had once been part of a solemn building, but now only a few melted, twisted dark walls remained. The giant picked up many gray-white stones from the nearby ruins and piled them in a corner out of the wind. Then he took two stones in his hands and patiently struck them together.

The dark, silent desert and the oppressive red wound in the sky seemed to no longer exist for him. In his eyes there were only the stones he was striking. The tap-tap-tap of stone on stone echoed dully through the veil of night and carried very, very far.

Vanna sat under the sheltering wall, watching the giant with curiosity. After a long time, she finally could not help asking: “What are you doing?”

“Drawing fire,” the giant said calmly. “Here, the nights are very cold.”

“But those are just stones…” Vanna looked at the gray-white rocks the giant had gathered, her voice full of doubt. “Are they stones that can burn?”

“They are ordinary stones,” the giant said without turning. “There is nothing else left here. Aside from sand, there are only stones.”

Vanna opened her mouth: “Then…”

She did not finish. A sudden burst of sparks cut her off. Tiny sparks leaped from between the stones in the giant’s hands and fell into the pile of pale rocks on the ground. Then the sparks turned into small flames. Bright fire rose from the stones and slowly grew stronger.

Vanna stared at this scene, unable to understand.

“Fire, and stone. They are the most important things,” the giant said quietly, gazing at the flames burning among the rocks. It sounded as if he were speaking to Vanna, and also to himself. “Flames that are lit are eyes opened in the veil of night. Stones broken by blows are far better than fangs and claws. When they lit branches, when they struck stones against each other, something unimaginable happened…”

The giant turned his head and lowered his eyes: “Traveler, do you know? The history of civilization started with fire and stone.”

Vanna listened, half understanding, and slowly nodded.

She had never done well in her culture classes, but she could still understand what the giant meant. She just did not know why the giant suddenly wanted to tell her this.

What did this have to do with “stones that could catch fire”?

But the giant clearly did not plan to explain further. He soon went back to his “work”. He reached into the pile of stones, not seeming to care about the heat of the flames, and took out a stone that had already been blackened by fire. He knocked off one corner of it, leaving a sharp point. Then he picked up the huge staff he had set aside earlier and, using the stone’s sharp edge, began patiently carving something on the surface.

The staff was very hard, and the stone points were fragile and easy to break. So the giant’s carving went very, very slowly. It often took many strokes to leave even a shallow mark on the staff. He also had to stop often and chip the stone again to make new “chisels”.

The surface of the huge staff was covered in countless markings… Had all those marks been carved this way?!

Even after watching only a short while, Vanna realized that this was a task so hard and slow it bordered on hopeless. She could not imagine how long the giant had worked, or how much patience he had spent, to leave all those countless marks on that huge Gatekeeper’s cane. She felt that even if she had an endless lifespan, she still would not be able to do such a thing!

Yet the giant just carved in silence and patience, using the only tool he could find in this dead world—stones baked by fire.

At last, Vanna could not help breaking the silence: “What are you doing?”

“Recording,” the giant said slowly. “Recording the things I still remember. Recording what once happened in this world.”

He stopped and put the staff in front of Vanna, then raised a hand and pointed at its lower end. There was a row of tiny symbols there.

“Here, they learned how to use fire.”

The giant spoke softly. There was a hint of pride in his tone.

Vanna followed the direction of his finger and finally saw the tiny symbols clearly. Only now did she see their details.

Simple lines formed the outlines of two small human figures. They stood in front of an abstract campfire, arms raised high, as if they were cheering and jumping, or as if they were worshiping the flames.

For some reason, Vanna suddenly felt a heavy weight pressing on her heart. She instinctively let her gaze climb up along the Gatekeeper’s cane, looking at the dense symbols there. She quickly saw that they were not all pictographs. Higher up the cane, the pictographs slowly turned into abstract, unfamiliar writing. The writing slowly changed again into many forms. Some split into letters. Others still kept a picture-like structure…

Her eyes finally rested on a small blank patch at the very top of the Gatekeeper’s cane. The campfire crackled beside her, and its light flickered over that empty space.

Vanna slowly lifted her head. Her gaze traced along the rough chipped stone and the thin arm holding it, and finally landed on the giant’s face.

The face, covered in wrinkles, was quietly watching the fire pit beside them, motionless, like another stone.