Chapter 616

Chapter 616.

Nina and Morris walked along the forest path. Daylight streamed through the thick canopy overhead, casting mottled beams across the woods. At some point a thin layer of mist had risen among the trees, and the sunlight diffused through it, making everything look even more dreamy and hazy.

The elf maiden who called herself “Celine” walked a short distance ahead. From time to time she stopped and glanced back at them, always looking endlessly patient.

“The forest is getting foggy,” Nina looked up at the distant, layered shadows of the trees and said quietly in her heart: “It’s the first time I’ve seen fog here… Uncle Duncan, how are things on your side?”

She slowed her steps, her face taking on the focused look she had whenever she tilted her head for the Listening Rite. Morris, walking beside her, also slowed down and listened carefully to the voice that came from deep within his thoughts.

A moment later, the old scholar’s voice sounded in the mental link: “You mean… the construction records for the Vanished? The old data from the Pland shipyard?”

Then the old man listened for a while longer. He nodded with a serious expression and replied in his heart: “I understand… Those records must still exist, but we definitely can’t get them by normal means. I’ll talk it over with Vanna later and see if we can look for some old friends in the city?state, or maybe approach the Church.”

The voice from the depths of their minds slowly faded.

Nina blinked and looked curiously at her teacher walking beside her: “Why did Uncle Duncan suddenly want the old construction records for the Vanished?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the Captain found something deep inside that ‘Vanished in the dream’,” Morris said casually. “But since he didn’t tell us the details, we’d better not ask on our own.”

Clearly, after serving on the Vanished for so long, the old gentleman had become very skilled at following the safety rules around the Captain.

He paused, then frowned slightly as he watched the white mist coiling through the dense forest, growing thicker with every passing moment.

“The fog is getting thicker…” he said, his expression turning grave. “I don’t know much about forests, but I can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong with this fog.”

Nina thought for a moment, already eager to try: “Should I use sunlight to disperse it?”

Morris glanced reflexively at Celine walking ahead, then quickly waved his hand to stop the young lady’s enthusiasm: “Don’t be reckless. Your sunlight seems to be a very strong stimulus to this dream.”

“Oh…”

And while they were delayed like this, Celine, who walked in front, stopped.

It was as if she could always sense with perfect accuracy the distance between herself and Morris and Nina. Whenever that distance grew too wide, she stopped at once, sometimes even asking about it or urging them on, just like now.

“Did something happen?” The elf maiden looked back in confusion at the two of them muttering in the rear. “We don’t have much time to waste. We have to get back to the Wall of Silence before we run into any corruption phenomena.”

“There’s a lot of fog all around us,” Nina hurried a few quick steps to catch up to Celine and took the chance to ask directly: “Does it get this foggy here often?”

“Fog?” Celine froze for a moment, then lifted her head to look around. A look of sudden understanding crossed her face, and she smiled faintly at Nina. “We’re very close to our destination already… We are almost inside the Wall of Silence.”

“You mean this mist is caused by the Wall of Silence?” Morris’s voice came from the side at once. “Or rather, that this ‘fog’ is itself a part of the Wall of Silence?”

“It’s magnificent, isn’t it?” Celine did not answer the scholar’s question directly. Instead, with a strange, excited joy, she looked around at the dense forest that the mist was slowly swallowing, as if she were the one seeing the Wall of Silence for the very first time. “From here, you can’t even see its full shape, but Atlantis can. From very high up, from the sky, Atlantis’s branches can look down on this wall…

“It closed before her eyes, shutting the whole kingdom away from the corruption outside… We aren’t there yet, there’s still a little distance. Deep in the fog there is another barrier, forged of light. That is the true body of the Wall of Silence, and it’s already very close, just a blink away…”

Celine spoke in high spirits. This “mind entity”, who had seemed especially calm and even a little stiff all along the way, suddenly gained a burst of lively human warmth in just a few seconds. She turned, hurried down the path into the thick fog, and waved to Nina and Morris as she went:

“Come on, keep up with me, we’re about to return to a safe place!”

It was the first time Nina had seen her act like this. She froze for a second before she came back to herself, only to see Celine’s figure already close to vanishing in the shifting depths of the thick fog. She hurried to chase with Morris, quickening her pace, yet for some reason she faintly felt…

That she would not catch up.

Before this, Celine had always waited for her and her teacher whenever they fell behind. The “Celine” that Shirley and Miss Lucretia met had shown the same “behavior pattern”. But this time, Nina felt that Celine would not stop and wait anymore. Celine’s steps held no hesitation at all. She almost rushed into the shadowy trees within the fog, like a traveler returning home after a long absence, like a drop of water going back to the sea.

The elf finally vanished into the boundless fog and never looked back.

Nina and Morris were left staring at each other in the mist?wreathed forest.

After a short while, Morris looked thoughtfully toward the direction where Celine had disappeared. “Her mental signature vanished right at the end of this path, within a few seconds after her figure left our sight.”

Nina thought for a moment, then asked uneasily: “So are we already lost… ? There is fog and trees everywhere, and everything looks the same.”

“We never knew the way in the first place,” Morris said, taking it rather well. “You don’t need to worry about being ‘lost’ in a dream, because in theory, whenever you move around inside a dream, you are lost by definition.”

Nina listened to her teacher’s lecture in a daze and felt it made a lot of sense. “That’s true.”

Then she asked another question: “So what do we do next? Do you need me to ‘fly’ up there and take a look around? I can hold back a bit.”

“Unless we have no other choice, try not to provoke this dream,” Morris said, waving his hand. Then, in the thick fog, he roughly confirmed the direction where Celine’s mental presence had vanished. He raised his hand and pointed toward the end of the narrow path ahead. “We’ll go this way, along the last route Celine showed us.”

“Alright!”

So the two of them, one old and one young, began trudging through the mist and forest that seemed to have no end.

They had only a general direction.

But Nina still remembered what Celine had said before leaving: they were only one step away from the Wall of Silence. In some distant past, the Sanctuary World that Atlantis built for the elves lay just beyond this thick fog.

It was only a blink away.

At some point, the daylight that fell through the gaps in the canopy had grown dim. The mottled beams turned into vague, suspicious shadows in the thick mist. The ground of the forest was rough. The narrow tracks stamped out by beasts on their way to water hardly counted as “roads”, and even those tracks did not appear everywhere. In many places, the fallen branches and leaves made the ground softer and harder to walk than those uneven paths.

And she did not know if it was just her imagination, but Nina felt the ground became harder to walk the farther they went. The plants grew denser and more tangled. Vines and bushes crossed and spread out as if they meant to block the way on purpose. A chill spread through the mist, as if what lay ahead was not a “final refuge” at all, but the greatest shadow in this vast dream.

She suddenly stopped.

In the dense fog, she seemed to see something flash past.

Nina almost unleashed a six?thousand?degree?Celsius slap.

But she managed to hold back that overly radiant burst of sunlight at the last second.

“Just now it felt like something ran past in the fog,” Nina said to Morris, a little nervous. “It gave me a scare!”

Morris glanced at Nina and saw two golden flames flickering deep in the young lady’s eyes. The air around her was slowly settling after a brief, warped distortion.

The old gentleman suddenly looked a little tense as well. He was not afraid that something dangerous might actually appear in the fog. He was afraid Nina would light up the forest with one slap.

After all, this child tended to explode the moment she was startled.

“Did you see clearly what it was?”

“No.” Nina shook her head. “I just felt like it was a very tall ‘person’ who ran past in a flash. But it might not have been a person. The outline felt strange… like it was distorted.”

“…We can’t tell what that was for now,” Morris said with a frown. “But I didn’t sense any mental activity just now, so it is very likely only an illusion born from the fog… We still don’t know how this so?called ‘Wall of Silence’ works, so anything we see inside it is possible.”

He paused, then could not help adding: “The key is that you stay calm, and keep control over your urge to lash out.”

Nina nodded nervously. She kept watching the mist around them and walked a few more steps forward.

Just then, a gust of chaotic wind seemed to blow through the forest.

She felt the fog in front of her suddenly thin out. Right after that, a vague curtain of light, like a warped mirror, appeared at the far edge of the dispersing mist.

That faint glow trembled in the mist, its surface reflecting a twisted view of the forest. Something seemed to lie behind the curtain of light, but it was hazy and impossible to see clearly.

Nina went blank for a moment, then realized they had arrived.

That was the “barrier forged of light” Celine had mentioned at the end of the Wall of Silence.

In the next second, Nina and Morris hurried up to the curtain of light.

A rampart forged from light stood at the border of the fog, grand and imposing, like the very end of this world of forest and trees. It stretched upward into an endless sky and outward to either side into endless distance. Ripples of light slowly flowed across its surface, as if it sealed off the worlds on both sides of the glow and quietly guarded the boundless secrets beyond.

“It’s… so beautiful.” Nina lifted her head in a daze and praised it without thinking.

Morris stepped forward. He had Nina step back a little, then carefully stretched out his hand and touched the layer of light that seemed to have no thickness at all.

And then the Wall of Silence collapsed without a sound.

That light?forged wall, which seemed to link heaven and earth and stretch without end in majestic, solemn glory, shattered like a soap bubble.