Chapter 667

Chapter 667: Reflection in the Eye

In the boundless, chaotic darkness, at the far end of a shattered continent, the one-eyed giant was gazing at the ghost ship passing close by. This “Elder God,” which had been dead for an unknown number of centuries, silently turned its cloudy eye. It was as if that eye had briefly awakened from the long river of time and was following the uninvited guest that had broken into this place.

Duncan stared hard at that eye. His whole body grew tighter bit by bit. Even if he would not suffer the so-called mental corruption, he still felt a suffocating pressure in the face of such a sight. But he did not make any rash move. He did not try to respond to that eye in any way. He simply let the Vanished slowly sail past the giant’s face and watched the eye, turning to its limit, slowly recede toward the stern.

The pale, one-eyed giant did nothing else. It still bore that broken mass of land on its back, floating in the endless, chaotic dark.

From behind Duncan, the Goathead that seemed to be the Dream-Skull suddenly spoke: “giants was the first to die.”

Duncan jerked around and looked at the “Dream-Skull” sitting honestly on the table.

“What did you say?” he could not help asking again.

“giants was the first to die,” the Dream-Skull repeated. Its tone and wording did not change at all. After that, no matter how Duncan questioned it, this was the only answer it gave.

Realizing that this broken fragment of an Elder God could only give this one response right now, Duncan did not keep pressing it. Instead, he turned back and looked at the one-eyed giant slowly fading outside the hull. After a long moment, he murmured to himself: “When the stars shattered and fell apart, the pale giant king Salmir died in the first Long Night…”

In the endless darkness outside the porthole, a faint layer of noise seemed to appear quietly when he spoke the name “Salmir,” then faded away like the wind.

Duncan glanced once more toward where the one-eyed giant lay, then suddenly frowned. After a brief hesitation, he stepped toward the captain’s door.

Before he left, he looked back once at the Dream-Skull on the chart table.

It was still staring at him. The obsidian-carved eyes were empty and dead.

Duncan ignored that unsettling gaze and turned to leave the captain’s cabin.

He climbed the slanted steps from the aft deck to the helm platform above the captain’s room. He walked across the lifeless, mottled, rotten planks. At the end of the platform, the heavy helm waited for him, swaying slightly left and right against the dark background of Subspace.

It felt like a silent invitation.

Duncan walked up to the dark-colored helm and took a deep breath.

He was about to do something bold. Taking the helm of this broken Vanished in Subspace was only the first step.

Once he calmed himself, he reached out, gripped the helm, and released the Power of Flame.

In an instant, fire spread out. The invisible, unreal fire of his spirit form swept over the whole ship in the blink of an eye. Then it slowly became transparent and faded away into nothing. Duncan felt his perception suddenly expand, and then that familiar feeling of “emptiness” came back with the feedback from the spreading flames.

He once again felt the emptiness of the Vanished and sensed its phantom nature. The flames seemed to spread directly through Subspace itself, touching nothing but cold and void.

But this time Duncan was ready. He did not let the shock of this “emptiness” cut off his link with the fire. He ignored the unease of feeling as if he were floating helplessly in Subspace without any protection. Instead, he focused more of his attention on the helm before him. He tried to give this helm real substance and control this phantom ghost ship through it.

Creaking noises rose from beneath the helm. The whole phantom ship began to tremble slightly. The spirit form sails filled out. In some unseen distance, it felt as if cheering came from far away, echoing from every direction.

The captain had returned.

Duncan slowly turned the helm. He felt the ghost ship floating in the darkness tilt a little and adjust its heading according to his control.

A strange feeling rose in his heart. He had truly taken control of this ghost ship sailing in Subspace. What was more, he even felt that sailing through Subspace was easier and smoother than sailing in the Mortal Realm.

The Vanished traced an arc through the dark. The bow turned one hundred and eighty degrees and faced once more the fragment of a heavenly body that looked as if it had been torn from a planet. The pale, one-eyed giant that had already drifted far away appeared again in Duncan’s view and slowly drew closer.

Duncan steered the ship back toward this Elder God.

When the Vanished came within a certain distance, the giant’s cloudy single eye on that pale face turned again. In the dark, it stared silently at Duncan.

Duncan acted as if he did not care about this gaze at all. During their close brush earlier, he had already noticed that this eye’s stare had no effect on him. Compared to the nervousness such a gaze might cause, he now cared far more about gathering information.

The Vanished slowly closed in on the giant’s face. In Duncan’s view, the cloudy eye grew larger and larger until it almost filled the entire height of the hull’s side.

Duncan stopped the ship here, let go of the helm, and walked over to the rail to study the eye up close.

The giant’s eyeball shifted slightly, its empty pupil turning toward him. The dead, cloudy eye was veiled by a layer of pale mist inside the globe. Duncan saw his own figure reflected on that misty surface, blurry and unreal.

“…What are you looking at?” Duncan suddenly asked in a low voice, driven by some feeling he could not name.

But he got no answer. The giant really was dead. The turning of that eye seemed to be only some “inertia” left after the ancient God’s death, or a faint “aftershock” in that massive corpse, maintaining a false image of life.

Duncan suddenly remembered a saying: after the Universal Extinction, in the cooling embers, the corpses of the Elder Gods ruled over the ashes of the world.

These dead Gods, even if they died again, and even if another long age passed after that, their remains still kept a certain level of “operation.” Their death was a strange, indescribable state. Even if they were broken into countless fragments like Goathead, twisted into impossible shapes, this “operation” would go on. It was as if this long process could continue forever.

Duncan still did not really understand what these so-called “Gods,” or the ancient Elder Kings, truly were, or what state they were in now. But from this pale giant king before him, he felt that he was slowly touching some “face of the Truth.”

Just then, Duncan suddenly frowned.

He seemed to see something.

Inside the giant’s cloudy eye, behind that misty veil, there seemed to be something else.

Duncan leaned in a little closer and studied the murky reflection even more carefully. He tried hard to pick out recognizable shapes from the shadows marked by the traces of time. Gradually, he finally picked out some things.

First he saw a huge being, with the fierce look of some sea beast yet a graceful and holy air. This being stood at the front. Beside it, there was a human-shaped figure wrapped in flames, standing to one side. Behind these two shapes, he could see some vague, glowing things. They seemed like a row of ordered lights, set into the surface of a giant cube.

Besides these, there were giants in black robes, like corpses; twisted, unspeakable masses; shadowy clouds floating above all these beings; tall, thin, crooked limbs; thick clusters of thorns; and pale golden arcs of light…

Many hazy, ghostly outlines like these were reflected in the giant’s eye. Each had a strange form. They stood in silence and solemn stillness in the dark.

Duncan stared, stunned, at those figures that seemed to pour out endless power even as mere reflections. Only after nearly half a minute did he suddenly realize what he was seeing.

These were “Gods,” the images of the ancient Elder Kings.

The single eye of the giant was reflecting a scene from long, long ago. In an age even older than ancient times, in some veil of night between the Great Annihilation and the Deep Sea era, these towering beings had once gathered here. They had stood in silence around the giant, surrounding it.

Their forms had been branded deep into this cloudy eye.

This had been a funeral.

It was the moment when the Gods saw off the pale giant king after his failed act of creation and death.

Duncan’s thoughts spun fast. At the same time, countless new ideas rose in his mind. Using the tales known in the world and the information he had recently gathered, he tried to match each reflected form in the giant’s eye with something he knew. But aside from the known Four Gods and a few other Elder Gods, most of the figures had no match in any legend or record.

More than half of those forms were completely unknown to him. They were not in the orthodox scriptures. Even in the wild myths and twisted stories of the cultists, he could find nothing about them.

Duncan stood there in silence.

If each “God” stood for a powerful civilization that had survived the end of the world, then it seemed that more than half of the Elder Gods had already fallen quietly before the third Long Night. Not even The Blasphemous Tome had kept their names.

Ancient Elder Kings who had died in the act of creation, like the pale giant king and the King of Dreams, were actually the lucky ones among these fallen beings.

Duncan let out a soft sigh and stepped back, ready to turn and leave.

But in that sigh, he noticed another detail.

His own figure was now reflected in the giant’s eye as well.

The reflection stood among the ancient Elder Kings whose forms had been frozen in the long river of time.

There was an empty place there, not too big and not too small.

It was as if, a hundred centuries ago, when those beings had gathered here to see off the pale giant king, they had already left that spot open.