Chapter 662

Chapter 662: Border Intelligence

Duncan gazed at the distant sea, lost in thought. Lucretia stood quietly behind him. The silence lasted for who knew how long, until Duncan finally broke it and said: “Tell me about the border.”

Lucretia took a step forward and said in a hesitant tone: “You…”

“I do not remember what happened back then,” Duncan said softly. “So I want to hear your view of the border. All these years, you have been active in the border region. As far as I know, you even risked entering that thick fog a few times… If we are destined to deal with that fog again, then at least I want to know what you understand about it.”

Lucretia’s eyes looked hesitant and complicated. She stared fixedly at Duncan’s back, as if she feared this figure would suddenly disappear into the wind again. Before today, Father had also spoken with her about the border, but their talks on this topic never went deep. She always chose to avoid it. Yet today… things seemed different.

After a few seconds, this “Sea Witch” finally spoke: “…I did enter that fog, but only at a very shallow level. Six nautical miles. That is my limit inside the mist. In theory, it should also be the limit of the Four Gods Church’s ships for monitoring in that area.”

“What is there?” Duncan asked curiously.

Lucretia thought for a moment and said: “Most of the sea there was calm, even calmer than other normal waters of the Boundless Sea. The surface was like a mirror. It clearly reflected the flag on the mast. There were no waves at all. The ripples raised when a ship passed would smooth out in a very short time. The whole sea felt like some heavy, sticky substance that could not form ripples. But it was in fact sea water, and the sailing of the ship itself was not affected…”

“But that was only the case in the Calm Zone. Between those calm waters there were strange and irregular belts of turbulence. They would appear all of a sudden, with no prophetic omen. Even after they appeared, it was hard to see them with the naked eye. The fast moving water still looked calm on the surface. It swept past like some kind of cutting line. If a ship came too close by mistake, it would enter a runaway state. In the lighter cases, the ship would spin quickly and be carried by the current onto the wrong route. In the worse cases, it would capsize outright.”

“And all of this could still be called the mild side of the mist. When it was not so mild… some very strange things would appear.

“Sometimes, things beyond understanding would suddenly appear in the fog, like huge blocks floating on the sea, or ‘mountains’ that stabbed straight up from the ocean like blades. But it was very hard to get close to these entities that surfaced from the mist, because very large scale anomalous phenomena in the sky would usually appear around them. Sometimes it was a storm. Sometimes it was a huge ring shaped current. Sometimes an entire stretch of sea water would even vanish into thin air, leaving a fault like a bottomless abyss below, terrifying beyond words…”

Lucretia stopped here. It seemed she was recalling things that left even a Sea Witch like her with lingering fear. After she took a moment to gather her thoughts, she went on:

“In the middle of this chaos, there were sometimes gains. For example, unknown ‘materials’ and ‘objects’ would appear together with the currents or storms. They were entities you could touch, catch, and store, and even bring out of the mist. Some of them were very useful, such as Ever-Burning Grease, or crystals that could drive away mental corruption. The Explorer Association and the Truth Academy would pay a high price to buy these items and study their uses. But in general, the things collected from these border manifestations were random and one of a kind. There was no way to get them in a stable way…

“In even fewer cases, in the middle of these chaotic and dangerous phenomena, there would appear…”

She suddenly stopped, as if she was not sure she should go on.

Duncan could not help frowning: “Lucy, what did you see?”

“Only once. To this day I am still not sure whether it was real or just a hallucination from extreme exhaustion,” Lucretia said after hesitating for a long time. “It was a huge cylinder that suddenly rose out of the sea. The cylinder was pitch black. giant ring like structures surrounded it, also black, with no visible detail. It was the only mist entity I ever managed to approach. The waves around it were not too strong, and the Radiant Star could barely hold its own there. I came to the foot of that cylinder. I even brought the ship alongside it and touched its surface with my hand… and then, I heard it speak to me.”

Lucretia raised her hand and pointed at her own head: “The voice roared inside my mind. It was a language I did not know, yet I could understand its meaning directly. It kept repeating one sentence: ‘Curvature Engine activated… we are leaving danger. Curvature Engine activated… we are leaving danger…’”

She lifted her head, saw the subtle change on Duncan’s face, and could not help asking: “Do you know what that sentence means?”

The moment Duncan heard the sentence Lucretia mentioned, he frowned. The words “Curvature Engine” raised a huge wave in his heart. He instantly thought of the ship that had crashed in the Deep Sea era, the New Hope!

Lucretia had found the wreckage of that ship? It had fallen into the Eternal Veil?

“Can you find it again? Have you seen it again after that?” he asked quickly.

“I am afraid not,” Lucretia said. From Father’s attitude she could feel how important this was, but she could only shake her head in apology. “The things that appear in the border mist are random and short lived, like illusions you can touch. When their time is up, they vanish without a trace. So far, I have never run into the same entity twice in that mist.”

A wave of disappointment rose in Duncan’s heart, but he did not show much of it. “…Besides that sentence, did you find anything else?”

Lucretia thought hard and said, not very sure: “Other than that, it was the touch when I laid my hand on it. It was an extremely strange feeling. It felt hollow. There was no temperature and no hardness. I know this sounds odd, but at that time my fingers could not tell what kind of material I was touching at all, or even whether I was touching anything. In that instant, the sense of touch in my fingers seemed to vanish. Or maybe that thing… only kept part of its properties in the Mortal Realm, so I could not fully sense the parts that had disappeared…”

As she spoke, she sounded more and more unsure, as if she could not clearly put into words what she had felt then or what she was guessing now. In the end, she could only spread her hands in helplessness: “Can you understand what I am saying?”

Duncan, however, showed a thoughtful look. After he heard Lucretia describe all these bizarre and unbelievable things, what suddenly came to his mind was the brief shift in his own perception, or rather his sudden insight into the world, in the few seconds after he saw the truth of the Great Annihilation.

He still clearly remembered the “true” face of the world he had seen in that final moment.

Broken pieces of information had joined together into the current Deep Sea era. Incompatible fragments of the Old World had crashed into one another, fused and twisted, turning into things that looked nothing like what they had been, or melting into the boiling stew of information at the bottom of the world.

Then… what about the things that had never fully merged, or that could not be completely erased or corrupted by other things because of some special nature of their own?

Such things had to exist. When a collision on the scale of the universe took place, the chances of every event, from infinitely big to infinitely small, would all stack together. Anything could happen. Anything could also never happen. So those “lucky ones” or “unlucky ones” that were bound to remain even after a chance that small had to have some place to go…

Duncan guessed that most of them should be in Subspace. In that dark and chaotic space, there were many things that seemed to be Old World wreckage. Torn landmasses, pale one eyed giants, and vague shadows floating in the void. They should all be fragments that had not been fully erased.

But now it seemed that some of them had fallen in places outside Subspace.

The “entities” the Sea Witch had seen in the border mist were things like that.

Lucretia felt a bit uneasy. She saw the expressions on Duncan’s face keep changing, as if some pattern of thought she could not understand was slowly taking shape in Father’s mind. It gave her the same feeling she had had back then, when she had a premonition of seeing the Starry Sky.

But this time, she did not truly see starlight rise behind Father’s body.

“I am very interested in those ‘entities’ you saw in the border mist,” Duncan suddenly said, cutting off Lucretia’s wandering thoughts. “What about deeper in? You just said you can only go six nautical miles into the mist at most. What happens if you go farther?”

“You completely lose your sense of direction toward the civilized world,” Lucretia answered at once, suddenly brought back to herself. “In fact, as soon as you enter the Eternal Veil, all normal navigation tools stop working. Even when you look out from the stargazing room at the Abyssal Deep Starry Sky, you can only see a hazy blur of shadows. Only within six nautical miles can the radio still barely work, and the lighthouses or ritual braziers set up on the border of the mist can still guide a ship back. But once you cross that six mile threshold, all contact with the civilized world is completely cut off.

“I once went too far in and crossed that threshold. Even though I crossed it only a little, I almost lost myself in that fog forever. Going back the way you came is meaningless, because once the ship goes through a Boundary Crossing, the continuity of space and time around you seems to be broken. When your ship goes one step forward and then one step back, it will not return to where it was…”

Duncan listened and could not help frowning: “Then how did you get back?”

“I…” Lucretia opened her mouth, hesitated for quite a while, and then said softly with a strange look on her face: “I saw the shadow of the Vanished.”