Chapter 682

Chapter 682: Starlight Overflowing

It was clear that the news Duncan suddenly revealed had shaken the Popes’ whole view of the world. They stood there trying to recover for a long time, and in the end they still had not really calmed down.

After skipping over anything related to Alice’s manor, Duncan briefly told Rune and the others about his talks with the Black Sun and the Abyssal Lord.

He was not worried that this information would corrupt the people here. On one hand, all his followers had already received his spirit flame baptism. That had proved they now had very high resistance to mental corruption. On the other hand, the Popes present almost dealt with mental corruption every single day. Their resistance looked very high. They were not about to go mad and start screaming just because they heard a few mutterings from the Elder Gods. If the group of bishops from earlier were still here, he would never have mentioned any of this.

Helena and the others looked at one another. After a moment of thought and hesitation, all three gazes fell on Rune.

The short, chubby old elf looked a little embarrassed at once: “…Why are you all looking at me?”

“You are the most learned among us,” Helena said, her face full of sincerity.

Banster nodded: “In the deep field of occult studies, you often have unique insights and a sensitivity as sharp as a prophetic omen.”

Frem said nothing. He only kept staring at Rune without blinking.

Rune stayed silent for a few seconds, his expression a bit strange. After thinking for a moment, he seemed to suddenly think of something. He turned to Duncan, who was watching the scene from the side: “You are sure you heard clear and rational voices from the Abyssal Lord and the Black Sun, right?”

“Of course I am sure,” Duncan spread his hands. “They were as rational as the way we are talking now.”

“Then the second question,” Rune said after a short pause, his face turning very serious. “Since you returned from Subspace to the Mortal Realm, have you ever run into any ‘chaotic creations’ that, in your eyes, were totally impossible to speak with or understand, completely unnamable?”

Duncan was slightly taken aback. Then he vaguely understood what the old Pope meant. After a brief silence he spoke: “…I have met many ‘chaotic, mad, uncommunicable freaks’ by mortal standards. But almost every time… I heard useful information in their noise-like roars. Sometimes I even felt they were deliberately trying to talk to me.”

He stopped there, leaving half a sentence unsaid—
[He had always thought that was normal!]

Rune’s expression clearly changed after hearing Duncan’s answer. His brows knotted at once. Beside him, Helena also reacted: “Wait, so that means…”

“…In the Captain’s eyes, there are no Elder Gods in a mad runaway state,” Rune said slowly, looking into Duncan’s eyes with a serious face. “You can understand voices that have completely left the baseline of reason in any situation. Even beings that would drive a mortal insane at a single glance are, for you, probably still understandable and open to communication.”

For a moment the hall fell silent. Except for Alice, whose brain never quite kept up, and Shirley, who never used hers, everyone began at once, almost on instinct, to think about what this meant, and to think about the ‘reason’ behind this incredible ‘phenomenon’.

While they were lost in thought, Morris spoke quietly, breaking the silence: “If we follow the ‘cognitive deviation’ idea you just raised, Teacher, then that means the Captain…”

“No matter how far everything deviates, it still stays within his range of understanding,” Rune nodded slowly. “This is a bit like… wait, wait, I need paper and a pen!”

Morris reacted at once: “Here.”

Someone quickly spread a sheet of paper on the table. Rune picked up a pencil and bent over it under everyone’s curious gaze, quickly sketching shapes across the paper. To Duncan’s surprise, they were not any complex and mysterious occult studies runes, nor any deep and hard-to-understand math formulas. What Rune drew were just one loose, seemingly random circle after another.

He drew many circular patterns. They were scattered randomly across the page. Some overlapped one another. Some only touched a little along their edges. Some were completely separate.

“Do you still remember the Great Annihilation? And the guesses about how the New World formed after the Great Annihilation…” Rune spoke quickly as he drew. “Many worlds crashed into one another. Their wreckage piled up to form the base of the New World. I call this pile of wreckage ‘Primordial Ashes’. At the very beginning, each set of ashes still carried the ‘rules’ of its own world. We can treat the ashes that share the same set of rules as one circle like this…

“Yes, the idea of sets. The Primordial Ashes left behind by each world are one subset. Do you see these circles that cross one another? The overlapping parts are the parts of the Primordial Ashes that are ‘compatible’ with each other…

“During the third Long Night, the Primordial Ashes that could fit together were rearranged. They formed the Deep Sea era we live in now… the ‘intersection’ in the sets. Yes, right here…”

Rune stopped and pointed with his pencil at the center of the sheet.

There, several large and small circles met. The overlapping parts made up an area only as big as a fingernail.

“This is our Deep Sea era,” Rune went on. “The Primordial Ashes from many pieces of world wreckage that could fit together and barely ‘hold’ under the same set of rules. Together they built the Boundless Sea, and the many city-states on the Boundless Sea…

“And outside this ‘intersection’, in the other parts of these circles that do not overlap, that is, in their ‘difference sets’, lie the things we can touch but cannot understand or control. They drift along the edges of our Mortal Realm, at the World’s Edge. They may show up as Visions, as anomalies, or as other strange phenomena—carriers of corruption…”

Rune thought for a moment, then pointed to the circles that floated outside all the others, those that did not touch any other shape at all.

“Here is where the Blasphemous Archetypes lie,” he said. “Where the Black Sun and other lost Elder Gods and exiled races are. We can no longer understand their existence at all, and they cannot fit into the Mortal Realm. Some of them have already vanished completely into the dark. Others… still drift as Primordial Ashes in some kind of time and space we cannot understand.”

Morris looked at the simple yet clear drawings his Teacher had sketched on the paper and quickly understood: “We sit inside the ‘intersection’, so we can only ‘understand’ the information inside the intersection. Things outside the intersection are, to us, unnamable noise and shadows…”

Rune nodded: “Yes. That is the ‘fact’ this model shows.”

“But for the Captain,” Morris went on, “both the strange shadows outside the intersection and the lost Elder Gods that float completely outside the system of sets are still understandable. In his eyes, there is no ‘world outside the intersection’…”

“As you say…”

Duncan stood to the side, quietly listening to the discussion.

They were talking about him, trying to use a set of logic to explain him. They were trying to know, to understand, to touch his “true secret”.

But he did not care.

He simply listened in silence, lost in thought in the Listening Rite.

His gaze rested on the diagrams Rune had drawn, gaze on the circles that crossed, overlapped, and stood alone, gaze on the Primordial Ashes drifting and scattered through this ruin, gaze on that sheet of paper.

For some reason, he suddenly recalled his recent experiences in Subspace, recalled the overflowing starlight he had seen in the eyes of those pale giants…

Vanna also walked up to that sheet of paper. She looked at the drawing on it and could not help asking softly: “Then where is the Captain on this…?”

Rune’s face grew solemn: “Only in one case can a ‘universal set’ hold all the subsets that have appeared here, and even those that have not yet appeared.”

Vanna thought for a moment and gestured on the paper: “A larger circle that includes them all?”

“No.”

Morris shook his head.

Then the old scholar stepped forward half a step and gently placed his hand on the sheet.

“It is this sheet of paper.”

As he finished speaking, he lifted his head and looked around.

Endless starlight filled his vision, filled his memories, filled his mind.

It filled the eyes of everyone in the hall.

Helena’s eyes widened in the starlight. In the towering wave raised by the Truth, she felt her mind on the verge of collapse. She saw a shifting shadow, a shape, swell up in the sea of starlight. The outline drew close to her, roaring—

“Isn’t it unbelievable?”

Rune stood stiff in the starlight. Noise and trembling squeezed out from his reason: “Truth… so beautiful…”

Then all the starlight suddenly vanished. The vast, rising and falling shadow shrank and collapsed in an instant that no human could sense, turning back into the Mortal Realm hall.

Vanna barely broke free from the terrifying afterimage left by the starlight. Through the strong dizziness, she saw the Captain walk to the table and slowly roll up the sheet of paper.

“Here is a suggestion for you,” Duncan turned his head and looked into Rune’s eyes. “Next time you want to discuss me, make more preparations first.”

The horrible afterimages left by the starlight finally faded away completely. Duncan had already rolled the sheet up and casually stuffed it inside his clothes.

As the Truth was covered for the moment, reason suddenly returned to everyone’s mind.

Banster drew in a deep breath and stepped back without thinking. Then he glared at Rune: “I should have kept my distance from ‘scholars’ like you from the very start!”

“You were the ones who asked me to analyze it!” Rune panted twice, first giving Duncan a fearful glance, then looking at Banster and the other two. “You tell me, did it work or not?”

“Captain…” Morris turned to Duncan, an awkward look on his face. “Sorry…”

“It is fine. Curiosity is human nature,” Duncan said with a laugh, his smile as gentle and forgiving as ever. “The good thing is that no one died.”