Chapter 642

Chapter 642: .

For Duncan, the “Great Annihilation” was no longer a completely unknown mystery. In the endless, heavy depth of the ancient Veil, the truth finally lifted a corner of its shroud for him—one crucial corner.

It was the collision between worlds that caused the Great Annihilation. The “incompatibility” between those worlds twisted the ruins after the impact into the strange and dangerous age of the Deep Sea. The scene buried in the deepest layer of Atlantis’s nightmare was only a small image taken from that collision.

And it was only a small image—those two worlds were far from the only ones that crashed together.

Duncan could feel that as he “understood” more of this truth, some kind of change was taking place, and that change was happening inside him.

For a brief instant just now, he even felt that everything in front of him turned into chaotic, empty… colors. In those colors he saw the true nature of the world. He saw that everything was like stars on the verge of falling. Each tiny light was made from abstract descriptions of information.

He also saw that all things stayed at the edge of a slow collapse. Their conflicting natures made them keep breaking apart and recombining in the depths of information. He seemed to understand the world’s real face, and he almost found the “single solution” to all contradictions and all imbalance.

But it lasted for only an instant.

He still seemed to lack something, a single, most important “parameter”.

Duncan’s reason returned to the Mortal Realm. He blinked. It felt as if countless voices were roaring inside his skull. Then the roaring slowly faded, and his thoughts began to clear.

He had already understood the nature of the Great Annihilation, and he understood how the Deep Sea age had formed… but what was that missing “key parameter”? He already understood the truth of the world, so what was left that he still did not understand?

The strong impression from that glimpse of the world’s true side still lingered in his mind. He could not help thinking about those abstract, difficult questions. But soon, he forced his thoughts to stop and noticed the worried look Lucretia was giving him.

Now was not the time to keep thinking about those things.

“It’s nothing. I just suddenly understood a few things.” He waved his hand, then turned his head and looked past the ship’s rail.

The Vanished was sailing along the surface of a curtain of light made from false sunlight. Blazing spirit form flames were spreading quickly over that curtain. They corroded and burned through this seemingly powerful barrier, and the clash of forces raised waves of storms made from light and fire in the distance.

But it still looked like it would take some time to completely melt through this “wall of light”.

Unless… a “weak point” appeared inside the barrier itself…

Beneath the light curtain and the sea of fire, on that nameless world covered in yellow sand, a desert storm formed once more. In the heart of the storm, a huge flash erupted again.

The howling wind that swept across the entire desert scattered once more. In the wild, chaotic currents of air, the Veil formed by the storm split into shreds, and the sand and dust fell back down in a dense rain.

In the fading haze of dust, a “sun” whose light was growing dim slowly appeared again. It floated above a lake of rolling lava, its surface flickering and swelling in a way that could be seen with the naked eye.

A breeze rose. Ash gathered and slowly reshaped.

“What are you?!”

The chaotic, trembling roar finally rang out again. A language humans could not understand mixed with that horrible noise. Under the false solar shell, the countless eyes of the Sunspawn trembled violently and stared hard at the figure walking out of the ash.

Emotion finally appeared in its roar, something almost like a human’s… rage.

Vanna slowly raised her greatsword. Her gaze stayed calm as she looked at the “sun” that had fallen to the ground in front of her and said slowly: “In the end you’re only an offshoot of the elder gods. You’re not that strong.”

But the Sunspawn ignored her. It only kept repeating: “What are you?!”

Vanna finally lowered her head and looked at her own body.

The last wisp of ash was being drawn back into her by the pull of the spirit form flames. She could feel her senses waking from numbness. Blood reappeared and began to flow again. A heart—a heart like a human’s—had already begun to beat once more in her chest.

She could even feel the process of that heart being reshaped.

“Just a pile of ash.” She stepped forward as she answered in a soft voice.

“Ash? No… you are not ash at all!” The Sunspawn’s hoarse, deep tremor came from far away. “Subspace… You carry the breath of Subspace. You are a Subspace shadow that leaked into the Mortal Realm—what are you?!”

Vanna suddenly stopped.

A trace of shock appeared in her eyes, followed by thought. Then she seemed to faintly understand something and spoke in a thoughtful tone: “You’re saying I am a Subspace shadow?”

The Sunspawn did not answer her question. It only let out a low, uneasy, jumbled noise. Its fire and light drew together again, repairing and reshaping the “corona” on its surface.

Vanna did not care. She had never expected to hear a complete answer from this blasphemous thing. Or rather, she had already gotten her answer.

Yes. By definition, she was the one who counted as a Subspace shadow. It was the power of Subspace that reshaped that pile of ash from more than ten years ago into “Vanna”. In that reshaping, she had already become a creation of Subspace in essence.

So a “being that returned from Subspace” should look like her.

“So… the captain is another kind of being…”

Vanna murmured softly to herself. Then she seemed to sense something. She lifted her head and quietly fixed her gaze on the “sun” lying on the distant land.

The Sunspawn felt her gaze. It also felt something deeply uneasy inside that gaze. Its surface swelled and writhed. It began to let out a low tremor, as if it were threatening her, or warning her.

But Vanna only laughed. She did not care at all about the waves of heat rising again around her, or about the deadly “sunlight” gathering slowly on the Sunspawn’s body.

“So you can feel fear too.” She let out a small breath and spoke with a smile.

Then the sky caught fire.

A sea of fire, rolling like an ocean and boiling like a storm, appeared all at once. In almost the blink of an eye, it covered a third of the sky. The flames briefly scattered the clouds and fog between the two worlds, then began to sink and curve downward toward the land.

A huge shadow appeared at the center of that sea of fire. It pressed down slowly as if it meant to pierce the sky itself. At the same time, layers of pale golden sunlight flashed for a moment along the edge of the fire. They seemed to be trying to rebuild the barrier and block this “invasion”. But in the next second, that sunlight shattered like glass. With the sound of something breaking, huge ship-timbers wrapped in flame finally fell from the sky.

The Sunspawn let out a wild chain of roars. It was shocked to find that the barrier it had built so carefully had already been melted through by some outside force, and even the flames on the barrier no longer obeyed its will. Then its many eyes were drawn to the giant ship descending from the heavens.

The “shell” made from fire and light opened. The tentacles piled up inside stretched and uncurled in the sunlight against their own will. Eye after eye that did not look like a human’s turned toward the outline of the Vanished. They stared at that mass of fire, at the figure standing inside that fire.

Truth had come.

A voice came from the sky: “You see me now.”

At once, the flames covering the Sunspawn’s shell turned a ghostly green. The green fire spread over the body of this child of the elder gods like a living thing. In a blink, it set the creature ablaze from the inside out, transforming it.

But it was not burned to ash in an instant. While the roaring spirit form flames burned through it, it actually struggled free of the ground and suddenly shot up toward the sky.

Almost at the same time, a bright stream of flame erupted from the bow of the Vanished.

It was a golden arc of fire. The stream of flame burst from the ghost ship’s bow as if from an eruption and rushed straight into the sky. It did not hesitate as it flew toward the Sunspawn, which was dragging a long tail of fire like an upside?falling star, and pierced it in a single instant.

Yet that “fireball” still did not die. It only paused for a moment, then struggled and continued to fly upward.

It was almost about to escape from this world.

But just as the fireball was about to become a fading blur at the edge of the sky, a huge phantom suddenly appeared in its path.

It was a black billy goat.

He was as large as a mountain and drifted at the horizon like a dark cloud. Phantom lightning jumped between His horns, while ghostly green firelight glowed in His eyes. His body gathered and formed out of the sea of spirit form fire flowing through the sky, and His outline stayed hazy and shifting. He dipped His head a little toward the Vanished in a silent greeting, then turned His eyes toward the fireball that was trying to flee.

The billy goat stepped back a few paces among the clouds. Then He lowered His head and suddenly sped up. The sea of fire gathered behind Him, then spread under His hooves to form a road. He began to run along this flaming path, like a black shooting star falling from the clouds. In a blink, He moved faster than the eye could follow, then slammed hard into the fireball that was rising faster and faster into the sky.

The huge explosion and impact shattered the last clouds between the two worlds. It even shattered the distant mountains and part of the already crumbling land. In the crash, the rising fireball broke into countless pieces. Large and small fragments turned to dust at once in the burning of the ghostly green flame. One shining “core” fell from the sky, but only halfway down it was swallowed by a burst of spirit form fire that appeared out of thin air and vanished in an instant.

The Black Goat walked out of the fiery storm born from the great explosion. He stepped down from the edge of the clouds toward the ground and, together with the Vanished, landed in front of Vanna.