Chapter 596

Chapter 596: Inherited Fishing Talent

Now Shirley once again set out on the road to that legendary Wall of Silence, together with Lucretia and still under the mental guidance of the elf maiden named Celine.

They walked through a dense forest where light and shadow tangled together. They stepped along paths covered in fallen branches and leaves, pushed through thorns and bushes. From deep in the woods came the cries of small animals and birds from time to time, but those sounds only made the forest feel even colder and more lonely. Looking at Celine’s back as Celine walked ahead, Shirley even had a brief illusion. She felt as if time had turned back and she had returned to that recent trek through the forest when she had followed this same guide.

Nothing seemed to have changed. The forest always looked the same. The noises around them were the same. And the two “Celines” looked completely identical.

Only the witch walking beside her, who sometimes turned into colored scraps of paper to hurry along, reminded Shirley that things had already changed.

By now, without the elf maiden noticing, Shirley had told Lucretia everything that had happened before. She had also shared it with everyone else trapped in the state of Dreamwalking, including the captain who was acting outside the dream. The captain’s preparations before the Dreamwalking had worked very well. The Power of Flame tied everyone together. That link was even more useful than Shirley had expected.

After learning what had happened to “the other Celine,” Lucretia could not help feeling different when she looked at the elf maiden walking in front of them.

That Celine who had moved together with Shirley had turned into a tree in the end. Before she completed that transformation, she seemed to have had something she wanted to tell Shirley.

So would this Celine also suddenly turn into a tree?

Over on Nina and Morris’s side, they had also met a guide who called herself “Celine.” What about that Celine? Would the same change happen to her?

In the end, what were these “Celines” that appeared in the Nameless One’s dream?

At first, Lucretia had only thought “Celine” was a mental entity, formed from the dream’s deep, chaotic thoughts. But now all kinds of clues showed that Celine had a special nature far beyond what they had imagined. This elf who called herself Celine seemed to have a very complex link with this forest and with the entire dream of the Nameless One. It was far more than a simple tie between a dream and a mind-born spirit.

The process of her transformation into a tree might be revealing the true nature of that link.

The elf maiden walking in front suddenly slowed her steps. She turned and looked back at Lucretia and Shirley, who were falling far behind, and waved hard: “Hurry up. The forest is too dangerous right now. Once we reach the Wall of Silence, you can rest.”

Lucretia glanced back at Shirley and Dog beside her, then they all quickened their pace together.

As she hurried to catch up, Shirley muttered under her breath: “Can that big Little Doll really find those sneaky cultists? I still feel like it’s not very reliable…”

“Rabby does act up sometimes, but as long as I give clear orders, it won’t cause trouble,” Lucretia said softly. “Hunting inside dreams is what it does best. It will track them and chase them all the way to the Mortal Realm, and then we can find where those cultists are really hiding.”

“So what is that big rabbit supposed to be, exactly?” Dog grumbled at her side. “I smelled… a human scent on it. It’s definitely not some simple magic construct, not even an ordinary evil spirit or some run-of-the-mill demon. And it’s not just the rabbit. The other things on your ship give me the same feeling. They all feel strange to me.”

“Human scent?” Lucretia looked at Dog and smiled a little. “Ah, as expected of a Abyssal Hound. Your senses really are sharp. Yes, it’s a human scent. It’s the human scent from a piece of my soul.”

Dog froze. “…Huh?”

“It’s nothing that big,” Lucretia said. “When Rabby first met me, it tore off a piece of my soul. It probably never thought that bite of soul would take away its freedom forever. A lot of the things on the Radiant Star are like that. They all came from the boundary regions or from the Spirit Realm. They were dangerous beings, and for a time they thought they were hunters and saw me as their prey. For me, that is a great convenience.”

Lucretia spoke slowly, still wearing that faint smile.

“I use my soul as bait and search for servants at the boundary,” she went on. “Souls cursed by Subspace make the best poison and the best chains. Those who mistake themselves for hunters end up bound by my soul. I sew them into cloth, pour them into bottles, carve them into wood. They become part of the Radiant Star. I need these servants, because I need assistants for my journeys along the boundary, and humans… humans die too easily.”

The sea witch finished her explanation and lowered her head to look at Dog. “Your sense is very accurate. That ship is full of tiny traces of ‘human scent.’ You really don’t need to be so shocked.”

Dog and Shirley both stared in a daze. Lucretia’s words had clearly stunned them. For a while, the two “people” said nothing at all.

Seeing this, Lucretia only smiled again. Pleased by Shirley and Dog’s silence, she turned back and continued to follow in Celine’s footsteps.

When the sea witch had gone a bit farther ahead, Shirley finally shook the chain in her hand. Even though she was speaking through the mental link, she still could not help lowering her voice: “DogDog, isn’t this what the captain called… what was it… baiting the spot? She’s using herself as bait?”

“Sounds like it,” Dog muttered quietly through the mental link. “The captain mentioned this when he was teaching me fishing tricks.”

“No wonder she’s the captain’s daughter…” Shirley could not stop herself from sighing. “That whole family seems to be good at fishing…”

“Tyrian doesn’t seem very good at it.”

“He fished up so many submersibles from the sea back then! He didn’t reel them up by hand, sure, but he was still one of the people in charge…”

“That counts?”

“Just answer this: did he or did he not pull them out of the sea?”

“…”

…

Duncan quietly shut down his “monitoring” of Shirley and Lucretia’s side.

He sat in a “chair” drawn from tangled lines and piled colors. Words like “baiting the spot” and “fishing” kept circling in his head. After a while, he turned his gaze a little and looked at the “mirror” nearby, shaped from uneven lines. He spoke to Agatha’s face in the mirror: “She never remembers proper knowledge, but anything else, she picks up so fast. If Shirley could put even a tenth of that effort into memorizing vocabulary, she wouldn’t be fighting Alice, that solid blockhead, over test scores.”

Agatha stayed quiet for a few seconds before she finally broke the silence. “To be honest, I also think Miss Lucretia has very excellent ‘fishing skills’…”

Duncan waved his hand. “Anyway, we don’t have to worry about Shirley and Lucretia for now. Being together is much safer than moving alone, and maybe that rabbit called Rabby really can catch those elusive cultists. What matters more now… is this ship.”

He rose from the chair and let his eyes pass over the piled, twisted colors and lines around him, picking out the outlines of different parts of the room from those lines. After getting used to this dizzying chaos, he had already recognized many familiar things in here.

There was a bed, chairs, a table, and other basic furniture, all placed roughly where they should be in the Mortal Realm. But when it came to details, like what was on the table now or what hung on the walls, everything blurred into messy patches of color.

It was just as Duncan had guessed. In the Mortal Realm, Goathead did not dare to spy on the true state of the captain’s cabin. At most, he had caught a quick glimpse inside when the captain opened the door. Those vague impressions had become the crooked lines and color blocks that formed this room.

Outside this room, though, the Vanished had been almost perfectly rebuilt one to one. That was because, in the Mortal Realm, Goathead knew every part of the Vanished by heart, except for the captain’s cabin.

This eerie version of the Vanished had grown out of the “shadow” of the Vanished in the Mortal Realm. But it was not a simple one-to-one swap. In this change, Goathead’s “awareness” and “memory” had played the key role.

By now the facts were clear. This ship was the dream of his first mate, even though Goathead had no idea he was dreaming at all.

But this place was also Atlantis’s dream. At the very least, there was some kind of “link” between it and Atlantis’s dream.

Duncan raised his hand. A tiny flame appeared in the air in front of him. The flame rippled like water and spread quickly in all directions, but it stopped when it reached the edge of this “chaotic room,” then rippled and reflected back.

This was the result of Duncan’s “tests” over the past while.

Inside this room, which Goathead could not perceive, Duncan could summon his own flames freely without worrying about waking Atlantis like last time. But outside the room, he could only move the fire seeds he had mapped onto the ship in advance. Any extra flame might wake Atlantis and end the Nameless One’s dream too soon.

So… was there a safe way to fully take control of this ship, deepen his link with Atlantis, and still avoid startling her again and stirring up her resistance?

Deep in thought, Duncan lifted his head and looked toward the door.

Maybe he was making this too complicated. Maybe it was actually very simple.

After a moment’s hesitation, he told Agatha to stay in this “safe room” for now, then stepped out.

That muddle-headed Goathead still stared blankly at the edge of the chart table and did not react at all when Duncan appeared. Duncan walked straight past him, past the room of the enchanted sea chart, and out through the cabin door. Then he followed the route he knew by heart, climbed the stairs beside and behind the captain’s cabin, and came out onto the aft deck.

In the endless darkness and slowly drifting mist, something appeared in his sight. It seemed to be quietly waiting for him, and had been waiting for a long time.

It was the helm of the Vanished.

“…Time to take the wheel again.”