Chapter 593

Chapter 593: Remnants Gather

On a patch of forest clearing lit by sunlight, Nina and Morris stopped and looked together at the tall figure who seemed to have suddenly appeared out of the air and now stood at the fork in the path with a surprised expression.

“Did you not receive the order to retreat?” After that brief moment of surprise, the elven maiden, dressed in light hunting gear and holding a strange long-handled weapon, spoke. Her voice was as pleasant as a stream in the woods. “Why are you still wandering outside the Wall of Silence?”

Nina and Morris quietly met each other’s eyes, then both gave a tiny nod.

“Uncle Duncan,” Nina said in the back of her mind, “we’ve run into a third ‘Celine’ here… Yes, she also mentioned the Wall of Silence.”

Morris quickly adjusted his expression and nodded to the elven maiden who had suddenly appeared at the edge of the clearing. He asked calmly: “We didn’t receive any message… May I ask what is happening now?”

The elven maiden frowned, seeming a little surprised at Morris’s “ignorance”, but that feeling soon faded from her face. “The situation is very bad. The corruption is spreading outside the Wall of Silence. Right now, only inside the Wall of Silence is safe in the whole realm—we still haven’t found the Creator. All elves must return to the inside of the Wall of Silence at once, to receive Atlantis’s protection.”

They still hadn’t found the Creator?!

Morris instantly caught that line, which held so much information. But he quickly controlled his expression, nodding seriously. “Then can you take us to the ‘Wall of Silence’?”

“Of course. Meeting a ‘ranger’ like me is your luck,” the elven maiden replied at once, nodding. “I may be among the last rangers still patrolling outside the wall—follow me, while the signs of corruption haven’t shown here yet.”

She turned and walked toward the depths of the forest, but after only a few steps she suddenly stopped and glanced back. “By the way, my name is Celine… Please remember this name.”

Morris and Nina quickly traded a look, then nodded in unison.

The elven maiden called Celine turned back around and kept leading her two uninvited guests into the depths of the forest, toward the Wall of Silence she kept mentioning.

…

After trekking through the forest for who knew how long, Shirley even started to doubt one thing: did this place called the Wall of Silence really exist?

She could no longer remember how long she had been following the elf ahead, or how far she had moved through this sea of trees. In her eyes, the forest looked the same everywhere—nothing but trees and more trees. Now and then she saw a fallen trunk lying in the dead leaves, or rocks and streams blocking the path. That already counted as rare “scenery” on the road.

The scenery was dull, and the road was even worse. The forest floor, covered in rotting leaves, was soft and uneven. Vines, thorns, and roots that stuck up from the ground kept appearing and were easy to trip over. She had once thought that the narrow, bumpy alleys of the lower city shantytown, cut to pieces by steam and gas pipes, were already the hardest roads in the world to walk. Now she found that for humans, even the most run-down corners of a town were far friendlier than this pure “nature”.

[What was it the captain said again… something called “the shaping power of civilization”?]

Shirley let her thoughts wander in her head, and, like a sacred miracle, she even recalled things she had learned in class. Then she lifted her head again and looked at the elf guiding them.

Celine, on the other hand, kept walking as if she were flying. This rough, hard forest seemed like a part of her own body. She moved through the annoying trees and vines as freely as wind blowing through a courtyard.

At last, Shirley stopped.

Celine stopped at once as well. The elven maiden did not even turn around, but it was as if she sensed the moment Shirley stopped walking.

“How far is it from here to the Wall of Silence?” Shirley asked first, before the other could speak.

“Very far. The Wall of Silence is very far away,” Celine answered with a serious face, though her answer was no answer at all. “We cannot rest for long. We must return to Atlantis’s protection as soon as possible, we must… get there before the corruption catches up.”

“What exactly is this ‘corruption’?” Shirley thought for a moment and finally asked the question that had made her curious the whole way.

She had not asked before because she was afraid that such a “basic” question might upset the elven maiden in front of her. According to Miss Lucretia, “Celine” was a “native mind” that moved inside a dream. Shirley did not really understand what a native mind was, but she roughly knew it was something very tricky. If you carelessly mentioned knowledge beyond its “boundary”, spoke of things outside the dream, or even just asked a few too many questions, it might cause that mind to go wrong.

Shirley was no stranger to “going wrong” like that. When she made up lessons with Alice and heard things that went beyond what she could understand, she would go wrong too—the main symptom was her thoughts cutting out.

In her own way, she understood the idea Miss Lucretia had explained. She believed that if she asked questions she should not ask, she could also make this elf maiden named Celine blank out.

She had been trying her best to avoid that.

But after spending some time with her, Shirley found that this “Celine” was not as “unstable” as she had first imagined.

Or rather—the elf was a bit too stable.

Even if Shirley mentioned odd questions, Celine would just ignore them. Aside from “leading lost people to the Wall of Silence”, this elf seemed almost entirely unaffected by anything else.

So after they had been on the road for a while, Shirley began to boldly ask the elf all kinds of questions. Most of them never got any useful answer. But sometimes… a casual question brought a surprise.

“The corruption… began after the Creator disappeared,” Celine said, stopping. Unlike most times before, she answered Shirley’s question seriously. “We do not know what it truly is, but it devours and twists things in the forest, turning them into… shapes that cannot be understood. It is very dangerous.”

“After the Creator disappeared? The Creator disappeared?!” Shirley’s eyes widened at once. While she had not listened very well in class, she always listened hard when the captain talked with the others, so of course she knew the stories about the elves. “The Creator you mean is… Saslokar?”

Right after the words left her mouth, Shirley felt something was wrong. She probably should not be calling a Great Demon God’s name so directly. It might upset the elf in front of her—but she soon saw she had worried too much.

Celine did not seem to notice Shirley speaking the main god’s name at all. She was sunk in some strange sadness, eyes lowered. “The Creator will return. The Creator is only inspecting the border. The Creator just went a little farther this time… Before the Creator returns, Atlantis will shelter all the elves within the Wall of Silence and the Sanctuary World… Atlantis will wait for the Creator to come back.”

For some reason, Shirley felt that Celine’s last sentence sounded like she was hypnotizing herself.

But before Shirley could ask anything else, she saw Celine—who just a second ago had been lost in sadness and a bit dazed—suddenly lift her head. At some point, the elf maiden’s eyes had become razor sharp. She gripped her long-handled battle-axe tightly and looked toward some point deep inside the forest.

Shirley tensed up at once: “Huh? What’s wrong?”

“Shh!” Celine lowered her voice. “Something foul has entered the forest…”

Something foul?

Shirley froze for a moment. Then she heard the rustling sounds coming from the nearby bushes, from deep under the ground, from the shadows of the trees, even from the air.

It felt like many strange, vicious things were writhing in the shadows and slowly gathering. A solid, heavy malice and a skin-crawling sense of being watched suddenly filled the thick woods. Shirley felt Dog send her a surge of shared senses at once. Through the powerful senses of the Abyssal Hound, she saw the things that were “seeping” into the forest.

Tentacles made purely of shadow were gathering from every direction!

[They are Sunspawn remnants… not Annihilators?!]

Shirley froze again. She clearly remembered that when she had just entered the forest this time, Dog had said it sensed lingering traces of Annihilators. So why were the first ones she met these monsters that followed the Black Sun?

But her shock only flashed through her heart for a moment. Shirley reacted at once and went into fighting mode. She tensed all her muscles, watching the directions where the dark tentacles gathered, and warned Celine in a low voice: “Careful. These things use shadows to move, and they’re really tough. They’re especially hard to kill!”

Before she even finished, she saw ripples begin to spread under the shade of a tree not far away. The tentacles that had been hiding in shadow form quickly gathered into tall, thin human shapes, each one taking on a solid body.

But that exact moment, when they took on human form, was what Shirley had been waiting for.

In the next second, the chain went tight and the air howled. Shirley lunged a few steps toward the nearest figure and swung her arm with all her strength, sending out a meteor dog!

Dog flew out like a huge flail, slamming full-force into the first Sunspawn remnant to appear. With a dull thud like meat being pounded to mush, the tall, thin figure did not even have time to look around the dreamscape before it was smashed into a spray of corrupted flesh.

Almost at the same time, all around Shirley and Celine, in the crisscrossing shadows of the dense forest and bushes, more and more tall, thin figures began to appear…