Chapter 670

Chapter 670: A Gloomy Future

At 99 Crown Street in Lightwind Harbor, inside the Witch residence.

Shirley lay bored over the windowsill, staring blankly at the street outside.

Peace and order had already returned to this city-state. Although many people were still troubled by the Dream After-Effect, the physical damage this Lightwind Harbor incident had caused was clearly far less than in Pland and Frostholm. At least, in the parts of the city one could see, most people’s daily lives had already gone back to the tracks they knew.

Some children ran cheering through a crossroads where the blockade had been lifted, holding colorful pinwheels as they dashed along the street in the bright sunlight.

It was close to noon. Vision 001 hung high in the sky. Many pretty blue rooftops across the street were bathing in the sunlight. Now and then, Shirley could see members of the Knowledge Guard in Guardian uniforms standing on high spots, watching the neighborhood with wary, serious eyes.

“Yawn…” Shirley stretched in a long, lazy way, then turned her head and glanced at Nina beside her. “What have you been doing since early morning?”

Nina sat behind a small table near the window, head lowered, gripping a pen and sketching in a big notebook. Her other hand held a glowing little “fireball”, which she sometimes raised to her mouth to take a small bite. She did not even lift her head when she heard Shirley: “Mechanical design. I’ll take it to the custom workshop later…”

Shirley listened in a daze. She could not help leaning over to look at the dizzying gears and linkages on Nina’s pages. She stared at this friend who loved to study, full of confusion: “…Didn’t the Old Gentleman say he wrote to Pland to help you drop out of school? You don’t have to take exams anymore, so why are you still working so hard?”

Nina immediately lifted her head and looked at Shirley with a very serious face: “It wasn’t dropping out. It was early graduation. I didn’t have much to do on the ship, so I finished all the high school courses. Teacher Morris talked it over with Uncle Duncan. They said there wasn’t much point in me going back to school like this, and the normal path for people doesn’t really suit me, so they handled an early graduation for me…”

Shirley was dumbfounded: “You can do that?”

“Normal people can’t, but Teacher Morris vouched for me. He can,” Nina said. She picked up the little Sun in her hand and took another bite. She chewed with a crunching sound and mumbled: “And I think it’s pretty good. I didn’t have many friends at school anyway, and I’ve been following Uncle Duncan on adventures outside for so long. I probably wouldn’t fit in if I went back…”

Shirley did not even notice what Nina said at the end. From the middle on, her attention had already fallen on that little “fireball” Nina was gnawing on. She held back for a long time, then finally could not help blurting out: “You’ve been chewing on this all day… Is that thing tasty?”

Nina casually handed the little Sun over: “Do you want to try?”

Shirley jumped back two meters at once: “I haven’t lived enough yet!”

“It’s actually not hot at all…” Nina sulked a little as she pulled the little Sun back and muttered: “What a pity. I even wanted to ask Miss Vanna to try it earlier, and she turned me down too…”

“Anyone with a normal brain would never accept that. Honestly, the scariest part is that you can really use this as a snack,” Shirley said. She kept a safe distance from Nina and looked at the fireball in Nina’s hand with a strange expression. “You just eat it like this… Are you really okay? The captain and the Old Gentleman really let you do this?”

“Yeah. After they confirmed it didn’t have any bad effect on me, Teacher Morris even encouraged me to keep ‘testing’ and ‘observing’ it,” Nina nodded and said. “He said my ‘devouring’ process of this Sun might reveal the transformations and compatibility between certain fragments of the Old World, and might even help find a way to solve the chaos at the base of all things… I don’t really understand the details, but he and Uncle Duncan talked about it for a long time.”

As she spoke, she lifted the little Sun again and took another small bite: “The things they discuss have been getting more and more advanced lately. This morning, after Uncle came back from the ship, they discussed for another two hours. I even heard them say they should find a way to capture another Ender to study, and they were talking about where to go catch one…”

Shirley’s face changed halfway through listening. She turned to look toward the living room not far away.

Duncan and Morris were sitting on the sofa in the living room. In fact, their discussion had been going on in fits and starts the whole time and had not ended yet.

Alice was sprawled beside Duncan at the coffee table. She held a pencil and was totally focused on doodling her “drawing” on a sheet of white paper.

“…We have never been this close to the ‘truth’ of the world’s origin. The ‘impact’ we observed in the deepest part of Atlantis’s memory is so far the only ‘event’ that can explain the Great Annihilation… I have been in contact with my mentor since yesterday. As far as I know, he has already shared this information with the other three popes…”

Morris spoke with a very serious face. In his hand, he absent-mindedly played with an exquisite crystal prismatic lens. sunlight from the window fell on the lens and kept refracting into all kinds of bright colors in his hand.

Duncan slowly nodded: “The Great Annihilation brought deadly chaos and conflict, and that chaos and conflict is still rooted in the essence of all things… The third Long Night did not solve that underlying clash. It only delayed its outbreak. Now it seems that this ‘delay’ has reached its limit. The coming of ‘dusk’ really cannot be avoided.”

“The key question now is what will happen after ‘dusk’ arrives, and in what form this so-called ‘fourth Long Night’ will come and end,” Morris said, his tone full of worry. “One obvious fact is that no matter what, our current ‘Deep Sea era’ will go through drastic change in that process. The city-states on the Boundless Sea… may be wiped out just like in the first two Long Nights.”

He suddenly stopped. After a few seconds of silence, he shook his head: “Or even worse.”

Duncan did not answer. Once the topic stretched to the coming “dusk”, the scene he had seen in Subspace rose in his mind on its own.

The ancient Elder Kings had circled around the pale giants who had died at creation, holding a funeral for an Elder God amid a dim Doomsday.

If every “Long Night” had to match a “dusk”, then the reflection he had seen in the giant’s single eye was the scene at dusk.

He also thought of that spreading starlight, and the roar that had come from deep within the stars.

After he had stayed silent for who knew how long, he finally spoke softly: “Maybe only the ‘Elder Kings’ can really answer my questions.”

Morris looked up in surprise: “What did you say?”

Duncan shook his head and did not answer. After thinking for a moment, he changed the subject: “From the information we have now, whether they are Annihilators or the Sunspawn of the Sun, they are all making preparations for the coming ‘dusk’. The word those Annihilators mention the most is ‘a new place’—in the next era after the Deep Sea era, they want to take a place in advance.”

“That may match the idea of ‘the abandoned races’ in the third Long Night,” Morris said at once with a nod. “Based on the evidence you recently found, not all ‘races’ could coexist after the Genesis Protocol. Many races were left outside the Sanctuary World during the third Long Night. The Black Sun may have been only one of them. Many more abandoned races probably did not even leave behind a single scrap of information…”

He paused a little here, seeming to fall into thought, then went on: “And if we start from the idea that ‘the basis of all things is conflict and destruction’, and add the condition that ‘the Gods build the next era on the world’s Embers’, then the coming fourth Long Night may mean building the next era on the Embers of the Deep Sea era. The most likely result is…”

Morris hesitated, but Duncan had already finished the words he had not said: “The next era will be a ‘Sanctuary World’ even narrower, tighter, and more crowded than the Deep Sea era.”

The living room fell into a brief silence. Only the soft scratching of Alice’s pencil on paper went on. The doll did not care about the questions she could not understand. She was just lost in her own “creation”, still full of interest.

After a minute or two, Morris finally slowly put down the prism in his hand.

“More ‘races’ will be abandoned. More creations of civilization will turn into the next era’s ‘Blasphemous Archetypes’. They will be destroyed, exiled, not allowed to stay in the Mortal Realm dimension, not even allowed to stay in the records of history. Many things we value in this era will become the next era’s corruption and taboo, just like the Sun’s Remnant Folk who were abandoned in the last era…”

Duncan nodded lightly: “So those cultists are making their preparations, hoping to secure a place to live in that next, even narrower ‘world’, or at least a ‘spot’ that will not be wiped out so easily. Stealing the power or remains of the Elder Gods is the method they have thought of—though whether it will really work is very doubtful.”

“But what happens after that? Will there be a fifth Long Night, a sixth Long Night? This cycle may keep going, and even speed up, until some limit is reached. And in that process… the ‘Sanctuary World’ will keep getting smaller and more cramped…”

Morris’s thoughts kept spreading out. In the end he was almost talking to himself, describing the ending he had worked out from his dark, pessimistic reasoning.

Embers could reignite, but any rekindling had a limit. A fire that kept shrinking could only ever warm fewer people than before, until the fuel ran out and all things fell into eternal silence in the cold.

In the next era, there might no longer be the Boundless Sea. The last place for civilization to live might be only a single city. After that, it might be only a town, a neighborhood, a single house, a small rock floating in the void. The last faint, muddled strand of “civilization’s” reason would cling to that stone, recalling the glow of past civilizations in a dull, witless daze, and then die in its last dreamlike murmur as its mind faded.

That would be the true end of all things.