Chapter 643

Chapter 643: .

The shockwaves from the great explosion rippled back and forth between the two worlds. The chaotic winds they stirred up whipped Vanna’s silver hair. She raised a hand to shield her eyes from wind and sand. She watched the ghost ship wrapped in roaring flames slowly descend toward the sea of sand, then saw the huge Black Goat step down from the clouds and walk, step by step, to stand beside the Vanished.

Then a stream of flame fell from the deck of the Vanished like a meteor. It burst open before her eyes, widening into a great door. Duncan stepped out from the door.

“Captain!” Vanna snapped back to herself at once. She started toward Duncan, but after only half a step her body swayed and she nearly pitched forward onto the ground. In the last second before she fell, she planted the Gatekeeper’s cane left by the giants and leaned on it. She wobbled twice and finally steadied herself.

Duncan hurried up to her: “How are you?”

Vanna held the Gatekeeper’s cane with one hand and raised her head with some effort. She forced a small smile. “This time I really… pushed myself.”

Then she dismissed the longsword in her other hand with a casual gesture. She reached into her clothes and groped around before taking out the “sun” that was still giving off warm, dazzling light. Her hand shook a little as she held it out to Duncan: “Here. This is the ‘sun’ Tarrigan left behind… it’s completely intact.”

Duncan noticed the name at once: “Tarrigan?”

“Yes. That giant… His name was Tarrigan.” Vanna nodded lightly. “He was the God of Recorded History. Long, long ago, He fell on the day the Great Annihilation took place.”

Duncan frowned hard and stared at the ancient “star” in Vanna’s hand, which shone with a warm light. Countless thoughts rose and fell in his mind before he finally reached out and took the sphere.

Warmth spread from his palm. The slow-turning flames on the surface of the sphere gently licked at his hand—but right now there was something even more important.

Duncan slipped the “sun” into his coat. He stepped forward to support Vanna’s arm, then used his other hand to take the huge Gatekeeper’s cane from her, rough and thick as a tree trunk. He could clearly see that this brave maiden was close to her limit.

Vanna did not try to act strong. She let out a breath and leaned most of her weight on the captain. At the same time, she lifted her head to glance at the huge Black Goat still standing quietly beside the Vanished and asked in a thoughtful tone: “…Is that the First Mate?”

“How did you recognize him?”

“The face. Even blown up this big, you can still tell.” Vanna spoke as she walked, then could not help adding, “Besides, I do use my brain sometimes.”

“It really is him. I repaired the keel of the Vanished and shared part of my own fire with him, so he could return to this form for a short time,” Duncan said as he led Vanna toward the flaming gate still standing at the edge of the dune. “We can talk about the details later. For now we go back to the ship. This is not over yet.”

As if to prove his words, even before Duncan finished speaking, a low, strange rumble and an unsettling howl began to roll in from far away. It sounded like two huge millstones starting to grind against each other again. Terrifying vibrations and thunderous booms echoed through both worlds at the same time.

On the far horizon, the “collision” that had paused before started again. Mountains collapsed. Clouds began to boil. In the sky above, in the ruins of Atlantis, a huge firelight appeared once more. Forests and land that darkness had almost swallowed completely were being rebuilt, as if time itself were running backward. But in the process of rebuilding, they took on twisted and frightening forms. In the very next second, those forests and lands, newly reborn and twisted, broke apart again and were swallowed by darkness. The process repeated over and over, step by step slipping into madness.

Around Vanna, terrible winds rose once more in the endless desert. This time, however, she was not the one controlling the “storm”. It felt as if countless grim phantoms were hidden in the gale, roaring and howling. Each phantom called out the names of the dead. A towering wall of sandstorm formed in the wind. Inside that wall, the shadows of cities and mountain ranges faintly appeared.

The final collision and fusion of the two worlds had begun.

In the last second before the storm hit, Duncan pulled Vanna through the spinning gate of flame.

The next second, she was already standing on the deck of the Vanished. The blazing spirit form flames outside the ghost ship formed a wall. The awful scene of the worlds colliding turned into warped, hazy images beyond the fire. Yet even through that fiery barrier, she seemed to hear both worlds screaming at once and the terrible roar of all things coming apart.

“I thought it was over…” She stared in shock at the world tearing itself apart beyond the rail. She felt the tremors running through the deck grow stronger and stronger and could not react for a moment. “Why…”

“We only destroyed the Sunspawn that invaded the dream of the Nameless One. Atlantis’s nightmare will not end because of that,” Duncan’s voice sounded beside her. “This is the deepest layer of the elves’ racial memory. A scene from the Great Annihilation was carved into it. The collision and extinction of two worlds is the ending this nightmare is bound to reach.”

The shaking of the whole ship grew stronger. Vanna braced herself, trying hard to keep her balance. She stared wide?eyed at the sight of all things collapsing in the distance and finally could not hold back: “Then how do we stop all this…”

Duncan only turned his head and quietly met her eyes. “Stop it? Stop what? Stop the collision of two worlds? Or stop the Great Annihilation from happening?”

Vanna froze, as if she were slowly catching on.

“The Great Annihilation already happened. In real history, as the beginning of the Deep Sea age, it has long since happened and ended. What remains here is only a ‘memory’ of something that already took place. We cannot stop it and have no need to stop it,” Duncan said, shaking his head slowly. “What we must stop is Atlantis.”

Vanna fell silent and only showed a thoughtful look.

Duncan walked slowly to the edge of the deck. He looked into the distance, at the doomsday scene of the world being erased.

The fusion of the two worlds had begun. At the end of the “collision”, the two inverted lands did not truly overlap in a physical sense. Before they could, they fell apart. In round after round of reshaping and twisted disintegration, they slowly turned into some dark and chaotic… “thing”.

Above and below the Vanished, around the deck, beyond the ship’s rail, the forests, mountains, deserts, and rivers of the past were all torn open. They soon lost all clear color and outline. The light of the world grew dim. Then those large and small remnants turned into one murky “clump” after another, each with a blurred outline. These clumps floated in endless darkness, bumped together again and again, and fused into even more twisted, grotesque shadows.

No one knew how long passed. At last, among all things that had almost sunk completely into darkness, dim currents of light appeared. They looked like the souls that remained after the world burned out and went dark, like the last glow in a bed of embers. Those dim streams of light flowed among the clumps of grotesque shadows, drifting without order through Duncan’s field of vision.

Deep in those dim, chaotic currents, in the wreckage left by the world’s collision, only one shape was left that still kept a faint outline.

It was a gigantic tree.

She floated quietly in the darkness of Universal Extinction, drifting in the time and years that had stopped moving after the Day of Ruin.

She was already dead, truly dead back when the worlds crashed together. The clash of laws and order wiped out all things. The gods died first in that process, and the World Tree created by the gods was no exception. Atlantis was only a phantom now, already long gone.

Yet she could not truly die.

Because in the elves’ deepest memories, there was always a World Tree like this.

Even if the elves themselves had been made again. Even if, in the third Long Night, the “Abyssal Lord” had rebuilt the elves. After seeing the true face of the Great Annihilation with his own eyes, Duncan already faintly understood what all “things” in the current Deep Sea age really were at their core.

Nothing could escape the clash of laws in the world’s collision. Not the mightiest warrior of any kingdom. Not the World Tree created by the deity. Not even the deity itself.

Duncan did not know exactly what kind of beings the present “Four Gods” were, including “Everburning Ember” Tarrigan. But he was sure of one thing: strictly speaking, this entire Deep Sea age was only something the Abyssal Lord rebuilt from a “blueprint” after the third Long Night.

Everything was embers.

Duncan quietly gazed at Atlantis, the tree that floated calmly in the dark. He watched her remains and the chaotic shadows around her, which had once been the homeland of a race.

The “World Tree” that appeared in the elves’ racial memory was, strictly speaking, also only a replica—but she could not understand that.

In the same way, she could not recognize the “elves” reshaped from ash.

Faint light slowly spread out from Atlantis’s remains.

Specks of flowing light seeped out of the dead tree like fireflies. They slowly gathered into a river in the chaos, winding and flowing. It circled gently around Atlantis’s roots, just as, long ago in the forests of the elves’ home, a river once flowed through the land and nourished the World Tree.

Every point of light in that river was a sleeping mind.

Fed by this “river”, Atlantis’s remains began to grow once more. Still a dead “corpse”, the branches of the World Tree rose in a strange way, stretching outward. From their edges grew fine, twisted, gray?white leaves, like a corpse climbing up from its grave, trying to crawl out of the land of the dead and into the living world.

Ted Riel’s last resistance had failed.

Duncan reached out his hand.

In the darkness, the Vanished sailed in silence toward that pale, twisted “tree of death”, a charred ruin that still kept growing and spreading.