Chapter 598

Chapter 598: Layered Space-Time

On the waters near Lightwind Harbor, far from the main shipping routes and covered in thin mist, the huge and imposing silhouette of the Vanished slowly cruised through the fog.

Then the sea surface suddenly rippled in a strange, unreal way. The ghost ship’s reflection rose and fell in those ripples. For a very brief instant, the reflection seemed about to gather itself up out of the water, but in the next moment everything returned to normal.

In the captain’s cabin, on the edge of the chart table, the wooden carving of Goathead suddenly turned its head in confusion. Its base gave a faint creak as it lifted its head and looked around. After a long moment, it muttered in puzzlement: “Why did that just feel so strange…”

On the wall in one corner of the room, the ancient oval scrying mirror now held layers of rolling black mist. The figure of Agatha stood within the glass, quietly watching Goathead on the table.

Goathead finally noticed the gaze from the side. It snapped its head around, saw Agatha, and let out a yell: “Hey… you scared me! Why are you staring at me first thing in the morning?”

As it spoke, it shook its head again, as if it suddenly remembered something: “Right, Lady Agatha, where did you go last night? I felt like your presence wasn’t on the ship… Don’t you usually wander through the mirrors at night to patrol?”

Agatha did not answer Goathead’s question right away. She kept quietly watching the every move of this “First Mate.” Only after a long silence did she speak: “You didn’t feel anything last night? You didn’t notice any anomaly when I left?”

“No,” Goathead said after a brief pause, then slowly realized something. “Wait, what do you mean… did something happen again last night?”

“Mm. The captain should be coming to see you soon,” Agatha said with a frown and a small nod. Then she asked: “Just now you said you felt strange. What exactly was that about?”

Goathead thought for a moment before realising she meant the muttered comment it had just made to itself. It still had no idea why this usually calm and gentle former Gatekeeper was acting so strangely this morning, but it still answered: “I don’t really know how to describe it. I just… jolted. Like I was spacing out and someone suddenly tapped me on the shoulder.”

Agatha gave Goathead a puzzled look and studied it for a moment: “…Do you have shoulders?”

“Then it was a tap on the head—just a figure of speech, you get it,” Goathead said, shaking its head. “Maybe I zoned out a bit while steering. There must have been a bit of swell on the sea just now that shook me awake…”

“There was no swell. The sea stayed calm the whole time—only the dreamscape rippled,” Agatha said, shaking her head. “You were dreaming just now.”

Goathead froze. After several seconds it finally let out a sound: “…Huh?”

…

Looking at the city streets, now completely back to normal in the morning light, Duncan slightly furrowed his brow. His face showed a thoughtful expression.

The two dolls stood quietly behind him.

He stood thinking like that for who knew how long, then suddenly muttered under his breath: “It seems that no matter how long I stay ‘over there,’ no matter how the Nameless One’s dream ends, when I ‘wake up,’ time in the Mortal Realm is always back at dawn…”

Alice turned her head to look at Lunie, then turned back to the captain and scratched her hair in confusion: “Uh… did you stay ‘over there’ for a long time this time?”

“From how it felt, I lingered in that dark, misty space for almost twice as long as last time—right up until the dream jolted awake again,” Duncan said, nodding slowly. “But it seems that the time node in the Mortal Realm was still the same as before. It was still dawn, just as the Sun was rising. That does… fit how dreams work, a little.”

He paused, searching for the words, then explained to Alice: “The way time feels passing inside a dream is chaotic. A single second and a thousand years of felt time might both be only an instant in the Mortal Realm, and everything gets corrected at the moment you wake up.”

Alice thought about it, then shook her head in confusion: “I don’t get it…”

“It’s fine. It’s not important,” Duncan said with a smile, pushing aside the messy thoughts in his mind for now. He stepped forward and ruffled Alice’s hair. “Let’s go back first. This exploration… was very fruitful.”

With the two dolls in tow, Duncan quickly returned to the witch’s manor at No. 99 Crown Street. His crew members had already come back from the dreamscape and had gathered again in the living room.

When Duncan walked into the living room, Vanna, Morris, and the others were already talking about their own experiences in the Nameless One’s dream.

Unlike last time, when everyone fell into dreamwalking with no prophetic omen at all, this round of dreamwalking had been done with preparation. Using flame, Duncan had left everyone a temporary mark, making sure the crew members could at least exchange basic information inside the Nameless One’s dream. So when they woke up this time, no one needed to spend extra effort explaining what they had gone through. They could focus their energy on discussing the various clues instead.

Duncan’s arrival broke off the crew’s discussion. Morris and the others all got to their feet to salute the captain. Nina, however, rushed over and threw herself at him, looking especially happy: “Uncle Duncan!”

Duncan gave Nina a gentle hug, then let his gaze sweep over the figures in the room. He saw Lucretia sitting on the sofa opposite the coffee table with a rather odd look on her face, and spread his hands with a smile: “Do you want a hug too?”

The witch of the sea thought for a moment, then shook her head: “No.”

Duncan chuckled and went to sit in his own seat. His expression quickly turned serious: “All right, then let’s get to business. We can skip the basic exchange of information. What we need to focus on now are two new developments.

“First, the ‘Celine’ who appeared before Shirley, Morris, and Nina.

“Second, the ‘giant’ Vanna met, the one who claimed to be a deity.”

He raised his head and let his gaze fall on Morris.

“I want to hear your thoughts first, Morris.”

“The fact that multiple ‘Celines’ appeared in the dream means we need to adjust our earlier judgment of her,” Morris said. He took off his blessed monocle and began to wipe it as he spoke. “Before, we judged that ‘Celine’ was only a mental entity that appeared in the Nameless One’s dream, like a native resident. Her actions did not seem closely tied to how the dream itself operated. But now, it seems that is not the case…

“Once the range and time of our activity in the dream pass a certain limit, a ‘Celine’ appears near us and tries to guide our minds toward that place called the ‘Wall of Silence.’ That kind of mental guidance might be a mechanism of the Nameless One’s dream itself.

“In other words, that elf called ‘Celine’ may be the avatar form of some rule within the Nameless One’s dream. She is not a mind of her own, but a mechanism. When the conditions are right, she is triggered. When the conditions change, she may vanish.”

As Morris spoke, his gaze shifted to Shirley at the side.

The “vanish” the old scholar mentioned clearly referred to the “Celine” who had been with Shirley earlier—that “Celine” had finally turned into a tree.

“As for the exact rules of this ‘triggering’ and ‘vanishing,’ we may need several more tests to sum them up—or we may never be able to,” Morris went on as he put his blessed monocle back on. “But one point is clear. The appearance of ‘Celine’ is friendly toward us ‘Visitors,’ while it is hostile toward those cultists who intrude into the dreamwalking state. She called those intruders ‘filth.’ That should represent the Nameless One’s own judgment, or stance. That is good news for us.”

Duncan listened quietly to the old gentleman’s analysis and nodded. Then his gaze fell on Vanna.

“Then about that ‘giant,’ Vanna, what do you think?”

“I have no leads,” Vanna said after thinking for a while. She shook her head honestly. “I went over everything that ‘giant’ told me, but I couldn’t find anything that matched in the myths or historical records of the Mortal Realm. Even in elven culture, where the historical line is relatively complete, there is no mention at all of that giant or of the ‘city of hills and plains’ he described…”

“Even the elves’ ‘heritage’ is only relatively complete. If that giant came from an age before the Great Annihilation, then it is perfectly normal that we cannot find matching clues in modern records,” Lucretia said, shaking her head. “The key question is what kind of relationship that giant and the desert under his feet have with the elves.”

The witch raised her head and looked into Vanna’s eyes.

“Miss Vanna, you never saw a trace of forest in that desert. And you didn’t hear any information about elves from the giant’s mouth either, did you?”

“Yes. Nothing at all,” Vanna answered with certainty.

“That elf called ‘Celine’ also had no idea what a desert even was. The only thing that could be linked to the ‘giant’ was her description of the creator Saslokar. She said Saslokar was a deity with no fixed form, able to turn into a deer, a goat, or a giant. But that connection seems far too forced to me,” Lucretia said as she thought aloud. “So right now, it feels like Vanna and the rest of us have been split into two different ‘space-times.’ The environments we face, the people we meet, and the information we hear are all completely different. Yet these two ‘space-times’ are definitely connected…”

“Yes. At the very least, both of these ‘space-times’ are certainly parts of the Nameless One’s dream,” Morris said at once, nodding. The old scholar wore a thoughtful look. After thinking for a moment, he spoke slowly: “Then we need to figure out one thing. What causes the huge difference between these two space-times? Is it a discontinuity in space, or a discontinuity in time?”