Chapter 620

Chapter 620: the sunlight Today Was So Nice

In the ruins of Atlantis, in the wind that suddenly blew across the scorched ground, a phantom appeared that looked like a modern Lightwind Harbor resident.

Nina and Morris both saw the phantom—it was clearly not an illusion.

“There is nothing here…” Morris walked to the spot where the phantom had just appeared, carefully checked the surroundings, and said in a low voice with a frown.

The sudden incident made Nina a little nervous too. She instinctively lowered her voice: “Why did that one just now look like a ghost…”

Morris gave this young lady a strange look: “Do you need to be afraid of ghosts?”

“…Right.”

Nina muttered this only after the fact, and the moment her voice faded, something else suddenly appeared at the edge of her vision.

It was another “phantom”. It appeared in the wind and dust, flashed past between the huge blackened ruins woven from branches. In that brief instant, Nina felt as if she had seen the person’s face clearly… she even felt that face looked a bit familiar.

It looked like the owner of that clothing shop in the western district of Lightwind Harbor, an elf lady who always wore a smile—she appeared in the wind with a blank face, then scattered with the wind again.

“Over here!” Nina reacted at once, grabbed Morris, and ran toward where the second phantom had appeared. Before they even reached that spot, Nina saw something else seem to flash through the mist in the distance.

Phantoms, phantoms of elves, began to appear again and again between the wind and dust. As Nina and Morris went deeper into the ruins, the phantoms appeared more and more often. At first they only flickered past the edges of their vision now and then. Later, no matter which way they looked, they could see one or two hazy figures, like ghosts, flickering in and out of the air.

Without noticing, Nina had already widened her eyes. She and Morris walked across the scorched ground that was covered in ash and black cinders, moving between the huge wreckage of Atlantis. Around them, “Lightwind Harbor residents” wearing modern clothes kept appearing and fading like unstable ghosts. These phantoms wore blank expressions and drifted aimlessly through the dust. They had no reaction at all to Nina and Morris drawing near, and they carried a… chilling feeling.

At last, Nina and Morris stopped in a wide open space.

Phantoms were everywhere around them, phantoms of elves. Mixed in among them were some shadows whose outlines were so vague their race could not be told. Near and far, real and unreal tangled together, flickering in and out. Chaotic winds raised sand and dust, blew through these hollow ghosts, blew through the vast, broken canopy of Atlantis. Under the dim, turbid sky, countless phantoms gathered in the ruins of this legendary “World Tree”, like a strange and horrifying… wraith gathering.

“This time I really am starting to get a little scared…” Nina nervously tugged at the hem of her clothes. The air around her twisted slightly, and hot radiance flickered in her eyes from time to time. “Are these really all the elves from Lightwind Harbor… I even saw that uncle at the corner of Crown Street who sells ‘elf wraps’. He puts that stinking rotten organ meat sauce in the wraps…”

As soon as the words left her mouth, she nervously glanced at that phantom not far away—because she still remembered that whenever she described “elf wraps” like that, that uncle would immediately get very angry and serious and correct her, saying it was actually “a pure traditional sauce with four thousand years of history”. The look on his face would be quite scary.

Yet that phantom simply faded quietly, just like the other phantoms that kept appearing and vanishing around them.

Nina turned her head and looked at Morris: “…Could all the people who disappear from Lightwind Harbor every night be here? Are they all inside the ‘Wall of Silence’?”

Morris had not spoken since just now. He only frowned as he looked around, a thoughtful look on his face. After a moment he suddenly broke the silence: “Atlantis is ‘protecting’ them.”

Nina did not understand at once: “Huh?”

“This is Atlantis’s ‘protection’,” Morris seemed to have figured some things out. “She is trying to ‘gather’ the minds of all the elves to the inner side of the Wall of Silence. She firmly believes this can protect them when the world’s Doomsday comes.”

The old scholar paused here. After a brief thought he went on: “Under normal conditions, every elf who enters the Nameless One’s dream should be teleported directly to this place and become one of the phantoms here. But the few of us are exceptions. The captain’s power lets us stay clear-headed in the dream. That is why ‘Celine’ appeared to us—Atlantis thinks we are elves who have lost our way outside.”

Nina listened in stunned silence, but she quickly understood what her teacher said, and her instincts told her this was probably the truth.

But this could not explain what Miss Vanna had run into—that desert, and that giant who claimed to be a “God”, what were those about?

Besides that question, Nina immediately thought of another, even more critical problem.

“Then if the minds of all these elves are trapped in Atlantis’s ruins every night… won’t something go wrong if this goes on for long?!”

“Of course it will,” Morris said, his expression grave. “Outside Lightwind Harbor, a condition called Sleep Sickness has already started to spread among elf residents of other city-states. Inside Lightwind Harbor, the dream’s corruption has already begun to leave marks in the Mortal Realm. If this kind of ‘protection’ keeps going… something big is bound to happen.”

Nina opened her mouth, as if she wanted to say something more, but right then the wind and dust rose again before her eyes, and a new phantom appeared in front of her.

It was a middle-aged man whose hair was dry and messy, whose beard looked as if it had not been shaved for days. He looked sloppy and tired. As an elf, a member of a race stamped with “healthy, long-lived, and elegant” as basic traits, that appearance instead gave people the feeling that his health was already at the limit, as if he might drop dead at any time.

Nina recognized this phantom at a glance.

“It is Master Taran Ael,” she said in surprise as she looked at Taran Ael, whose face was blank and who was just as dazed and frozen as the other phantoms. Even though she had already seen other “acquaintances” here a moment ago, seeing this elf scholar still caught her off guard. “He appeared here too…”

“It seems everyone who disappears during the Nameless One’s dream will appear here. That is not surprising,” Morris said calmly. As he spoke, he walked up to Taran Ael’s phantom and looked at him with a slight frown. “The key is to figure out what state these elves in the ‘dreamwalking’ phase are in. They seem to have formed an ever more stable link with Atlantis. It is unlikely we can wake them easily…”

Nina also came closer. She braced herself and poked Master Taran Ael’s arm with a finger: “I remember Mr. Ael was trapped in a dream once before. What method did he use then to wake himself up and save himself…”

Taran Ael’s phantom suddenly blinked.

Nina thought she had seen wrong and lifted her head to look again.

Taran Ael slowly turned his head and shifted his gaze onto her.

Nina: “…”

The next second, a huge fireball rose into the sky above the ruins of Atlantis.

A shocking shockwave shattered the chaotic clouds in the sky. The chaotic winds circling the remains of the World Tree froze for an instant. The terrifying fireball rose like a new star and, in just a few seconds, turned the whole scorched land as bright as day!

But the fireball did not explode directly on the ruins of Atlantis or on the “phantoms” wandering within the ruins.

Her usual hard training showed its effect. At the critical moment, Nina raised her head to the sky—her scream turned into the roar of the Sun. The spewing stellar matter only created a temporary Sun high above the Nameless One’s dream that lasted a few seconds. In the grand Coronal Blast, the damage was held to a minimum.

But even such a brief impact sparked a reaction from the Nameless One’s dream at once. The forests close to the Wall of Silence howled as they grew madly. The ground trembled under the Sun’s light as if it were about to boil. Distant mountains rumbled, and it seemed that if it had lasted even one second longer, Atlantis would have awakened under this otherworldly sunlight. Yet as the fireball in the sky faded, the Nameless One’s dream still calmed down at the edge of collapse.

Inside the ruins of Atlantis, the huge cloud of dust raised by the shockwave in the sky had not yet settled when a dusty figure crawled out of a heap of ash—Morris. He slapped the dust hard off his clothes, shook black cinders out of his hair, then dug at his ears before finally lifting his head to glare at Nina: “How many times has the captain told you, stop jumping straight to blowing things up every time you get a scare!”

Nina’s whole body still shone with golden sunlight, and she herself had not completely cooled down. Hearing her teacher Morris’s words, she scratched her face in embarrassment. Before she could speak, Taran Ael’s still-shaken voice came from the side: “Is that how you use ‘get scared then blow up’?”

Morris’s beard bristled as he glared, his face full of annoyance: “Just say whether it blew up or not!”

It was no easy thing to make this usually refined and calm old scholar lose his composure like this. It was the first time Nina had seen her teacher almost jump up and curse. But compared to this small matter, what shocked her more was Master Taran Ael beside them.

This elf scholar, who a moment ago had only been a dazed phantom, had now turned into a vivid and lively “mind entity”. He stood in the swirling dust. Though the recent impact of the Sun had left him rather disheveled, he was clearly completely awake now.

This Grand Scholar was staring blankly at Nina, who was still glowing, his eyes full of lingering shock.

Clearly, having the Sun blow up in his face the instant he woke up was a bit too much stimulation for a middle-aged man in poor health.