Chapter 599

Chapter 599: The Mechanism of Awakening

As it turned out, what a truly seasoned scholar thought of when facing a problem was indeed different from an ordinary person.

The question Morris raised in his thinking almost instantly lit up many people’s thoughts.

“First, we have a major premise. The ‘desert’ Vanna saw and the ‘forest’ the others saw are both parts of the Nameless One’s dream. Under that premise, these two ‘places’ have only two possibilities,” Morris said as he sat on the sofa, slowly laying out his thoughts. “Either the ‘desert’ and the ‘forest’ are different locations at the same moment in time, or they are the same location at different moments in time. In any case, they should not be two completely separate systems. At least one of time or space should connect them.”

Nina did her best to follow the old gentleman’s line of thought, then suddenly asked curiously: “Why can’t they be both different locations and different moments in time?”

“Because they are in the same dream,” Morris explained. “A single dream cannot contain two or more completely independent systems of time and space. Otherwise, they would be two unrelated dreams. At least, the knowledge I have right now does not support that idea.”

“Oh…” Nina drew out the sound and nodded, half understanding and half not.

Duncan was still turning over the two possibilities Morris had raised. In his mind he kept testing the two models—“the same place at different moments” and “different places at the same moment”—against the clues they already knew. After a long while, he set the complicated question aside for now and said: “Let me remind you of something. Besides the ‘desert’ and the ‘forest,’ there is another ‘place’ drifting on the edge of the Mortal Realm. It is not inside the dream, but it is clearly also part of the Nameless One’s dream.”

“…That dark space filled with mist, where the Vanished’s reflection sails,” Morris said at once, his expression turning serious. “I have also been thinking about this. Which part of the Nameless One’s dream does that dark mist correspond to, exactly?

“The most likely guess for now is that it lies on the border of ‘about to wake but not yet awake.’ On that reflected Vanished, you can touch Atlantis’s echoes, but you cannot directly see what happens inside the dream. That matches the traits of a dream’s border very well. It is just that, clearly, the ‘border’ of the Nameless One’s dream is quite vast. It is large enough to let an entire ship drift aimlessly within it…”

Duncan recalled the streams of light he had seen on that reflected Vanished, and the voice from Atlantis he had heard within those lights. His expression slowly turned thoughtful.

The reflected Vanished was Goathead’s dream. It sailed along the border of Atlantis’s dream. Atlantis seemed to be waiting there all this time for Saslokar. Yet the Goathead in the dream had told Duncan that Saslokar was already dead, and had died long, long ago…

After thinking for a moment, Duncan shook his head. Right after that, he noticed something slightly off in the room, and his gaze landed on Lucretia: “Where is Rabby?”

“You finally noticed,” Lucretia said with a faint smile. “Rabby didn’t come back. It jumped into other dreams. It should still be chasing those prey right now.”

Duncan froze for a moment before he understood what Lucretia meant.

That eerie stuffed rabbit doll had actually tracked down those cultists?

“It will crawl out from those cultists’ nightmares and then leave coordinates in the Mortal Realm that are enough to summon you. I have already told Rabby to leave some of them alive,” Lucretia went on. “Don’t worry. In matters like that, it is reliable.”

Duncan nodded slowly.

Just then, he seemed to hear something again. His brow creased as he looked toward the nearby coffee table.

He reached out and gently brushed his hand across the surface of the table. Ghost?green flame spread over the wood like a phantom. The outline drawn by the fire took on a mirror-like sheen, and Agatha’s figure slowly emerged from within it.

“Agatha,” Duncan said as he looked at the lady appearing in the mirror. “Is something happening on the ship?”

“I may have found the reason the Nameless One’s dream jolted awake this time. It has to do with the First Mate,” Agatha said with a quick nod. “If possible, I hope you can come back for a bit.”

…

On the misty sea near Lightwind Harbor, a doorway of flame suddenly opened above the deck of the drifting Vanished. Duncan and Alice stepped out of the gate.

Duncan turned his head to glance at Alice, who had followed him back.

The doll had followed along as if it were only natural. When she saw Duncan looking her way, she just showed her trademark cheerful grin: “Hehe—I came along again!”

Duncan sighed helplessly and waved at the doll: “Fine. I’ll go to the captain’s cabin and see what’s going on. You go to the food storage hold again and check those barrels that had problems before.”

“Okay, Captain!”

Alice left in high spirits, as if she carried a great mission. Duncan watched the doll go, then tugged at the corner of his mouth and started toward the captain’s cabin.

As soon as he opened the door, he saw Goathead on the edge of the chart table whip its head around. Its black obsidian eyes stared straight at him. On the nearby wall, Agatha’s figure stood in the ancient oval scrying mirror. For some reason, this usually calm and reliable Gatekeeper looked utterly exhausted, even like she had lost all will to live.

Duncan froze for a moment when he saw Agatha’s deathly tired face. Before he could even ask what had happened, Goathead’s noisy voice suddenly burst out:

“Captain, you’re finally here! Your loyal—well, everything that needs saying—has been waiting so long! Is what Agatha said really true? Did that Nameless One’s dream appear again last night? And did you meet that Goathead who looks exactly like me again? She also said that eerie, gloomy Vanished you saw came out of my dream, but I didn’t even know I could dream! She said it was because of that little jolt of mine that the Nameless One’s dream was startled awake, and it even interrupted what you were doing. But I really don’t know what happened. You have to believe me, I never meant to hide anything, who could have known that last night would…”

In that instant, Duncan almost felt the buzzing racket condense into a solid wall and slam into him head-on. The nonstop chatter drilled into his ears with a roar, and his mind started to hum at once. Only after several minutes did he snap back to himself and quickly wave his hand: “Stop! Be quiet!”

Goathead stopped at once, but the joint between its neck and base gave a strange cracking sound—as if the earlier stream of chatter had been so strong that even slamming a halt to the topic made a noise.

Then Duncan heard a sigh of pure relief from the mirror beside him. Agatha said: “It’s finally over…”

Duncan gave the lady in the mirror a strange look.

“As you ordered, I did not hide what happened last night from the First Mate,” Agatha reported to the captain, her face full of exhaustion. “And then it turned into this. Before you came, it just kept going on and on at me. No matter where I hid, I could hear it muttering, muttering, muttering… Even the undead I met in the Frostholm cemetery—one who was framed, had his home destroyed, died unjustly, and clawed his way back out of the grave three days later from sheer resentment—couldn’t complain as much as it does! The noise it makes in one minute beats twenty old ladies at the citizen Center all complaining at once about the price of bread going up!”

Agatha added in deep bitter frustration: “And telling it to shut up doesn’t work at all! It only listens to you when you say that!”

Duncan finally understood why Agatha had worn that expression of “I might as well have died back in the Great Hollow under Frostholm” when he walked in.

It took a lot of effort for him to control his own expression. Keeping his face as straight as he could, he tried to comfort her: “…You’ve worked hard.”

Agatha let out a sigh. Her figure in the mirror split into several shards at once, showing that she had mentally cracked and no longer wanted to think or respond.

Duncan: “…”

He felt that he probably shouldn’t have stuffed so many strange ideas into his crew members’ heads. When they tried to carry out some abstract phrasing, they ended up even more abstract than the words themselves.

Ignoring the cracked Agatha in the mirror, Duncan turned his gaze back to Goathead.

The black wooden carving was staring straight at him. Maybe because it had been holding back so many words, even its stiff wooden face looked a little twisted.

“Don’t waste too many words,” Duncan said first, making that point clear. Then he spoke again, his face serious: “Second, everything Agatha said is true.”

Goathead’s head twitched. Its jaw opened and closed several times before it finally forced out the words: “I… I really, in my sleep, turned the Vanished’s reflection into that ship you saw in that dark space?”

“Or to put it another way,” Duncan said calmly, meeting Goathead’s eyes with a godlike gaze, “when the veil of night descends over Lightwind Harbor, your dream will sail along the border of the Nameless One’s dream.”

Goathead’s head squeaked and creaked as it shook. It looked oddly conflicted: “But I really don’t know… I was just steering while fully awake. The enchanted sea chart also recorded the Vanished’s cruising route, and it matches my memory exactly…”

Agatha’s voice suddenly came from the side: “Then how do you explain that little jolt of yours when dawn came?”

Goathead fell silent.

Duncan, however, raised his head and looked at the oval scrying mirror on the wall.

Agatha, who had been in pieces just a moment ago, had already recovered and was now watching them with a very serious expression.

“After leaving the Nameless One’s dream, I returned here at once,” Agatha said. “I saw the First Mate wake up from some kind of… trance. It said it had just been distracted, but I can be sure that the Vanished’s reflection returned to normal at the very moment it ‘woke up.’ If I’m not mistaken, that should also be the reason the Nameless One’s dream was jolted awake this time.

“So I suspect that whether it is Atlantis or the First Mate, as long as one of them wakes up, the Nameless One’s dream will end.”