Chapter 666

Chapter 666: gaze

Even though a long time had passed since his last visit to Subspace, Duncan still clearly remembered that on this ruined version of the Vanished, on the Subspace side, there had been no Goathead in the captain’s cabin.

On the chart table here, there had only been a single enchanted sea chart, showing eerie and suspicious routes.

Now, however, a pitch-black Goathead sat quietly on the chart table. In the dim light, it silently fixed its gaze on him. At the same time, Duncan was sure that the instant he had opened the bedroom door, this black Goathead had turned its eyes toward him.

It was a living thing. It was reacting to outside stimuli.

Duncan quickly forced his expression under control. While he carefully watched the Goathead that was staring straight at him, he walked out of the bedroom and slowly approached the chart table. As he moved, the Goathead on the table reacted as well. It slowly turned its gaze, and its eyes stayed on Duncan the whole time.

Duncan suddenly frowned.

This Goathead looked exactly the same as the Goathead in the Mortal Realm, but something was off about its position. In the Mortal Realm, the “Goathead” sat at the left edge of the table. The one before his eyes, though, was placed closer to the middle.

Duncan quickly searched his memory and soon remembered. Before he had gone back to the bedroom to rest, he had placed the “Dream-Skull” in that very spot.

The Dream-Skull? This was the Dream-Skull he had brought back from the cultists’ ship. Why had it appeared here in Subspace?!

Countless messy guesses and thoughts surged up at once in his mind. Duncan cautiously walked to the side of the chart table. He braced both hands on the edge of the table and, with a face like still water, stared at the Goathead on the table. The Goathead slowly raised its gaze, its hollow eyes meeting Duncan’s.

That silent, empty gaze was a little horrifying.

After a few seconds of this quiet standoff, Duncan decided to break the silence. He kept his face tight, his expression serious, and greeted it: “Hello, I am Duncan.”

The strange Goathead on the table spoke: “Hello. You are not Duncan.”

For a moment, Duncan almost failed to hold his expression together.

But the thick nerves he had trained up by dealing with all the oddballs on the ship finally did their work. At the critical moment, his face stayed stiff. Only the storm in his heart was not so easy to calm—this eerie Goathead had actually spoken?!

And more shocking than the fact that it had spoken was what it said.

Controlling the changes on his face, Duncan forced himself to speak in a calm tone as he asked: “If I am not Duncan, then who am I?”

“You are the captain,” the Goathead, which seemed to be the Dream-Skull, said calmly.

When it spoke, its voice was almost exactly the same as the “First Mate” Duncan knew so well, but there was a strange gloom and bluntness in it. It felt very unsettling.

As Duncan tried to get used to this odd feeling, he looked at the eerie Goathead with a strange expression. What it said sounded very strange to him, so he could not help asking again: “Isn’t the captain of this ship Duncan?”

“You are the captain,” the Goathead said, meeting Duncan’s gaze. “You are not Duncan.”

It seemed that these were the only words it could say. No matter how he questioned it, no matter how he changed the way he asked, its response never went beyond those two lines. The person speaking to it right now was the captain of this ship, but that person was not “Duncan.”

After a few rounds of questions, Duncan stopped probing in this direction. A thoughtful look came over his face.

He was the captain of this ship, but he was not Duncan—of course he knew he was not Duncan.

He was Zhou Ming, a wandering soul. The identity of the great explorer named Duncan Abnomar was only something he had “occupied” for now. The real Captain Duncan had died a century ago. That, he knew.

But all this time, only he knew this—well, to be exact, the Goathead First Mate in the Mortal Realm might also know, but it would never say it out loud.

This was a fact that could not be announced on the Vanished.

Yet the Goathead that seemed to be the Dream-Skull in front of him had spoken this truth directly.

Duncan raised his head and looked at the ruined cabin around him, then through the empty windows toward the broken masts, the deck, and the distant rail outside.

This shattered Vanished sailing through Subspace did not change at all just because someone in the captain’s cabin had torn open the secret that “the captain is not Duncan.”

Was it because this was Subspace? Because this ship was only a projection? Or was it because the Dream-Skull that had pointed it out was not a part of the Vanished, so its knowledge could not affect the ship’s stability?

Duncan slowly drew back his gaze and looked down again at the Goathead on the table.

Then what exactly was this Goathead? Was it the true body of the Dream-Skull, or only the Dream-Skull’s projection in Subspace? Or… had the Dream-Skull been split into two parts from the very beginning, one part found by the cultists, and the other always left here in Subspace?

After frowning in thought for a while, Duncan tried asking: “Who are you?”

The Goathead on the table fell silent. A long time passed, and just when Duncan thought it was not going to answer him, it suddenly opened its mouth: “I do not know.”

Duncan suddenly felt a little curious: “Then what do you know?”

This time the Goathead stayed silent even longer. When it finally spoke, its answer was still the same: “I do not know.”

“…You do not know anything, yet you know I am the ‘captain’ here, and you also know I am not Duncan,” Duncan said, his expression a bit odd. “Then do you know this ship? Do you know where you are?”

The Goathead did not respond at all. It stayed silent and still, as if it had become a real wooden carving.

Duncan slowly understood. The mind of this “Dream-Skull” was not complete.

Unlike the “First Mate” in the Mortal Realm, this Dream-Skull seemed to have only a few scattered memories and a broken, fragmented way of thinking. Even though it showed some ability to talk here in Subspace, that ability only let it answer a few questions. As soon as a question went “out of range,” it fell into stillness.

Yet within this damaged and fragmented mind, the Dream-Skull still knew that the “captain” of this ship right now was not “Duncan.”

Duncan fell into thought. A vague guess was already forming in his heart.

This might still be tied to that “deal” the real Captain Duncan had made with Saslokar deep in Subspace a century ago.

In that deal, the Vanished, which had almost been fully swallowed and assimilated by Subspace, had been reshaped into a real ship again by the King of Dreams. In return, the King of Dreams, broken and trapped deep in Subspace, had gained a chance to escape. Even though what escaped was only a spine and a shard of skull, and even though almost all memory had been lost, Saslokar had indeed returned to the Mortal Realm.

The Dream-Skull before him should be one of the fragments that had failed to escape from Subspace back then. It had gone through that deal as well, so it knew what had happened to the real Captain Duncan, but it remembered it only in broken pieces.

Duncan had a strong feeling that this Dream-Skull still knew more—more about Saslokar, about Subspace, and about the Vanished of that time.

But its damaged and chaotic thinking could not sort out those scattered memories.

Just as Duncan’s thoughts followed this path and he began to consider how he might use mental guidance on this Dream-Skull to get more answers, a light tremor and a strange noise from some unknown direction suddenly broke his train of thought.

The Vanished was shaking. Something outside the hull seemed to be drawing near.

Duncan lifted his head from the table at once and, by instinct, looked toward the nearby window.

Vast, rolling shadows, and a pale, cracked “land,” had appeared at some unknown time in the endless darkness outside the window. That huge pale structure moved slowly past the ship. On its surface, besides shocking cracks and wounds, there were lines and patterns that looked almost like skin.

Duncan’s heart suddenly jolted, as if he had thought of something. He strode quickly to the window.

At that moment, new shapes appeared on that slowly moving “pale land” outside the window—first a widened fissure, then dark yellow, murky crystals, and then a huge mass of eye tissue that almost filled the entire view outside.

A gigantic eye was slowly moving past the captain’s window.

Duncan stood at the window, watching that cloudy single eye slide across his field of view. As his sight moved with it, he saw the structures around it—a pale, inhuman face.

Then his gaze went even farther. He saw the immense body that rose and fell in the darkness, and the broken land that seemed to be “embedded” all around that body.

It was the pale, one-eyed giant that bore a shattered land on its back in Subspace.

Duncan suddenly remembered. The first time he had entered Subspace, he had seen this shocking being from afar.

But that time he had only skimmed past at a distance and had not even had time to see any real detail of the giant or the land on its back. This time, the Vanished was gliding past right against the giant’s face.

The impact and shock of this sight were far stronger than before. Even Duncan felt a sense of suffocation for a moment.

He kept his gaze on the slowly moving giant outside the window, on that cloudy, dead eye.

That dead, cloudy eye also quietly gazed back at him. As the Vanished moved, the eyeball slowly turned. In the chaos of Subspace, it calmly fixed its gaze on Duncan.

Duncan: “…?!”

He blinked and checked again. The giant’s cloudy eye really was turning slowly as the Vanished passed. That eye had seen the Vanished. It was staring at this ship.