Chapter 659

Chapter 659: .

In the power section at the deepest part of the machinery compartment, all crew members and cultists who had once stood watch here were dead, but the massive steam core assembly still ran on without anyone at the controls.

The reactor boiler let out a low vibration. The pipes and valves around it gave soft hisses now and then under the automatic balancing system. Warning lights for the Boiling Gold catalyst blinked steadily, showing that pressure in the steam core was running high.

At the end of a steel platform a dozen meters from the steam core stood a huge copper column between floor and ceiling. Parts of its casing were cut away, revealing complex gears and linkages constantly turning inside. The precise machinery clacked in a continuous wave. Strips of paper were drawn into a slot at the edge of the column and spat out from another, then were transferred by teleportation to other backup devices or punch-card analyzers.

This expensive, precise Sorting Engine was automatically calculating parameters related to the next stage of the voyage and feeding the data to the machinery compartment. Part of its input and output came directly from the navigation station above. None of this could be allowed to fall into those Subspace Shadows’ hands.

The great gloom in fate was gathering. A prophetic vision more frightening than death itself had come: that ghost captain had already reacted, and his wrath was descending on this place.

The huge bone spider hesitated no longer. He swung his long limbs, scuttled quickly up to the copper column, and drove a bone spike straight into the Sorting Engine’s main drive shaft.

The black bone spike was shrouded in a corrosive field. The protective casing of the drive shaft, tightly wrapped in thick copper and steel armor, gave way like paper. The spinning steel shaft inside shrieked in an instant, and the gears and linkages connected to the main shaft suffered a catastrophic breakdown, dragging the following punch-card machines and stored paper tapes into the mess.

The Sorting Engine and the later punch-card analyzers all drew power from the same main shaft. A single breakdown was enough to destroy the entire system. This was a deliberate “safety flaw”, meant so that in an emergency, the ship’s recent voyage records and its control center could be destroyed in the shortest possible time.

But that was not enough. Destroying the Sorting Engine alone would not stop that ghost captain.

As long as the ship could still sail, it could still carry that captain to the “Holy Land”.

What the “Saint” had to do was remove the steam core’s safety limits.

A steam core in active reaction was nearly indestructible. Its heavy shell isolated the Boiling Gold catalyst and reaction medium from the outside world. Even nitroglycerin might not be able to blow apart that sphere. He had to force an emergency shutdown first.

Now the shutdown conditions were met.

As the drive shaft of the Sorting Engine broke with a roar and the gear trains screamed, every mechanical device linked by gears, belts, and rods began to fail in a chain reaction. The steam core’s output flow almost instantly passed the relief valve threshold. Lethal high-temperature, high-pressure steam filled the machinery compartment. The overpressure blast blew the steam core’s safety pins, and with creaking noises, the reactor boiler’s spherical shell began to descend.

The Boiling Gold catalyst dropped out of the core as the shell lowered, but the searing “fireball” still burned fiercely deep inside the reactor boiler. Its terrifying heat rushed with the flow toward the control platforms—a blast hot enough to steam a living person in an instant.

But to the “Saint”, it was only a breeze.

He raised his bone limbs into the “breeze”, seized the nearby barrels of nitroglycerin, and charged without hesitation toward the reaction vessel that was pouring out deadly heat and whose interior flames were surging.

[The time for martyrdom had come, the time for martyrdom had come… Blow everything here to pieces. The Holy Lord’s work must not be disturbed by that evil spirit returned from Subspace…]

Flames roared in the reactor boiler. The runaway state blaze tottered on the Critical Threshold. A single barrel of nitroglycerin would be enough to give it a “push” at this point and blow the whole ship to pieces.

The Saint lifted the explosives high.

At almost the same moment, the flames inside the reactor boiler suddenly took on a layer of ghostly green light.

A terrifying face appeared inside the reactor boiler. In that storm of flame that was racing into a runaway state, Duncan’s upper body slowly rose out of the steam core’s torrent of fire. He bent down to stare at the bone spider holding the nitroglycerin barrel up close and asked in a thunderous voice: “You think this will work?”

“Die, Ghost!”

The bone spider roared and hurled the nitroglycerin at the reactor boiler.

A violent explosion followed. In a flash, the entire reaction vessel was caught up in a runaway state detonation of terrifying scale. Duncan’s flame avatar, not yet fully condensed, flickered in the blast, and the surrounding flames that had not yet been corrupted by spirit flame turned into the shock wave, sweeping everything in the compartment into the explosion.

The steam core exploded. The Boiling Gold catalyst triggered a chain reaction at the critical pressure. Amid terrifying thunder and wildly boiling heat waves, the whole ship began to tear apart with the machinery compartment at its center.

In the shock storm, the pitch-black bone spider stretched out his limbs, using every spike to cling desperately to anything nearby. His bone plates ignited in the heat. A shimmering glow spread over the swelling, writhing surface of his brain. His nerves burned away, and the blood in his brain boiled. He was close to death, but a strange, feverish excitement still stirred his mind.

He had succeeded in blowing up the steam core before that ghost captain fully took control of this place.

No one on this ship could survive, including himself—but at least the “Holy Land” was safe.

The lower hull beneath the machinery compartment began to split. Torrents of seawater boiled in the flames, then poured into the ship with a deafening roar.

The “Saint” folded his badly burned eyestalks and quietly waited for death to come.

But death did not come.

At some point, everything around him became quiet.

After a moment of hesitation and confusion, the dying bone spider slowly raised the eyestalks around his brain again. In his blurred, dim vision, burned by heat, he saw a bizarre scene.

Every flame in the machinery compartment was suddenly tinged with ghostly green. The spirit form blaze froze in midair as if time itself had stopped. The shattered pieces of the ship froze as well. Even the surging seawater hung motionless where it was.

And in the midst of this frozen world hung the blown-apart steam core. Its fragments still floated in midair, and droplets of molten steel spread out like a strange, dazzling flower.

A tall figure descended from the exploding fire of the steam core. In the frozen machinery compartment, Duncan stepped out of the flames and walked up to the bone spider.

He brushed aside the floating molten metal beside him and ordered the frozen flames blocking his view to move away. He regarded the “Saint” with a calm gaze.

This “Annihilation Priest”, whose body no longer showed anything human, was still alive. After facing the steam core’s massive explosion at point-blank range, after enduring a blast hot enough to vaporize steel, this monster was only badly burned.

And in their brief clash earlier, this creature had quickly judged the situation and unhesitatingly chosen the higher-success “blow up the ship” plan. That kind of quick, sensitive decision-making was almost like a kind of Foresight.

Very strong, very smart, and possessed of extremely strange power.

But to Duncan, something else mattered more—

As Rabby had said, this Annihilation Priest had already “eaten” his symbiotic pact demons. That erased his greatest weakness as an Annihilator: he would not die from the death or runaway state of his symbiotic pact demons.

That made him a bit more “durable”.

Of course, it was obvious that, if this Annihilator was to be useful, he had to heal first. In this weakened state, he could never withstand the pressure of establishing contact with the Abyssal Lord.

For now, Duncan cared more about another matter.

“I’ve heard this ship has a supply port you call the ‘Holy Land’,” he said, lowering his head and fixing his gaze on the bone spider’s many eyes. “Where is it?”

The feeble bone spider trembled slightly. Some of his limbs struggled up, then quickly fell again. A hoarse, muffled voice came from deep within the grotesque tangle of flesh: “Give up… You will never find it… I have destroyed all navigation records and control devices. Besides that, the Holy Land’s position existed only in my brain—and just now, I destroyed that part of my memory. Even if the Four Gods themselves came, you would not find that route…”

But to the “Saint’s” surprise, the ghost captain before him did not show the slightest displeasure at this answer.

Duncan only shook his head with a hint of regret.

“It’s fine. It won’t take that much effort.”

In a vague sense, the Saint suddenly felt something. He struggled violently with his bone limbs, and his badly damaged eyestalks turned one after another toward the figure standing in the flames: “What… what are you going to do?!”

Duncan did not answer. He only turned his head to look at the frozen flames in the air, the ship’s shattered compartments in the distance, and the surging seawater beyond the broken hull.

The ship was torn so badly that, through the broken upper decks, he could faintly see the sky between the frozen flames.

“This ship is good. What a pity.”

He sighed softly, then turned to the steam core that had been blown completely to pieces. He reached out to gently touch the ball of fire frozen in midair.

This flame had once been the ship’s heart.

Now, it needed to beat again.

The ghostly green flame began to ripple, and a low, strange rumble rose from every inch of the ship. As the shaking grew stronger, the powerless, broken vessel seemed to slowly “come alive”, struggling as it began to pick up speed.

Duncan leaned close to the light of the fire and gave the awakened ship an order—

“Go home.”

And so the great ship changed course and set out on the homeward route.