Chapter 687

Chapter 687: Settling In and Conversation.

The Sun going out could make teleportation spells run wild and cause people to vanish from the Mortal Realm?

After hearing Lucretia’s analysis, Duncan felt a wave of doubt. But this world already held so many strange and eerie things, and the Sun going out was the strangest of them all. At this point, nothing that happened really counted as surprising. The most important thing now was to figure out where that “Truth Keeper” had gone.

Just then, Duncan suddenly frowned. It was as if he had heard some message from far away. His expression turned odd.

Alice, who was closest to him, noticed at once: “Eh? Captain, what’s wrong?”

Duncan looked up. With a strange look, he glanced at Lucretia and Morris, who were still talking about how to search for Ted: “…Ahem. There’s no need to look.”

Lucretia and Morris: “Huh?”

“He’s fine,” Duncan said, waving his hand. “Ted Riel is on the White Oak right now.”

Everyone in the room looked at each other. After a few seconds of silence, Vanna finally broke it: “…The White Oak? Lawrence’s ship? How did he end up there?!”

“We don’t know yet. It seems even Ted Riel himself can’t explain it clearly,” Duncan said with a sigh. He kept his link with Lawrence open in his mind as he spoke. “Just like last time, the White Oak was still at sea when the Sun went out. The sailors on board saw Ted Riel drifting at the ‘dark border’ on the sea’s surface, and then Anomaly 077 fished him up…

“Lawrence says Ted’s mental state was in complete chaos at first. He could not even talk to anyone. He is only starting to recover now. It seems he went somewhere very, very far away. From his broken descriptions, it sounds like…”

Duncan stopped there, and his face grew a little more serious.

“It seems to be Subspace.”

Ted Riel was wrapped in a thick blanket and sat in a brightly lit cabin. Someone handed him a cup of hot tea that was still almost too hot to hold. He cupped it in both hands, looked up, and said: “Thank you.”

The shriveled, frightening mummified corpse stood in front of him and waved a hand. “Just don’t hit me flying again next time. If these bones break, I don’t know if they’ll ever heal right.”

Ted Riel’s expression turned complicated at once, as if he had just remembered something unpleasant. He gave the “anomaly” a stiff, embarrassed smile. The fellow was clearly in a special runaway state, yet he moved around the White Oak like an ordinary crew member, working hard all over the ship. In the end, Ted could not hold back and asked: “You are Anomaly 077, the sailor?”

“Hey, you know me?” The mummified corpse brightened at once. He leaned closer as he spoke. “Every other ordinary person who sees me just gets scared out of their wits. But you even know my name and my number?”

“…I am the Truth Keeper of Lightwind Harbor,” Ted Riel said calmly, watching the mummified corpse sit down beside him. “Years ago, I was the one who signed your transfer papers.”

The mummified corpse had just started to sit when he sprang back up again. He stared at Ted Riel, pointing at him with a bony finger, his whole body trembling with excitement: “You… you, you… you’re from the Church?! You…”

“Calm down, Mr. mummified corpse,” Ted Riel said helplessly, clearly having expected this reaction. “I know you’re a special runaway?state anomaly now. Don’t worry. I’m not going to force you back into—”

He did not even finish before the mummified corpse dropped to the floor with a thump. The corpse reached out with a bony hand, grabbed the edge of the blanket, and wailed in a voice that could freeze the heart: “I’ve been waiting for someone from the Church for so long! Please seal me! A rope that actually works is enough! If that’s too much trouble, just give me a piece of the shroud and I’ll wrap myself… or you can hit me even harder than you did just now…”

Ted Riel had never imagined a scene like this. The mummified corpse’s shrieking and wailing threw him into a panic. He clutched the blanket and scooted back while he babbled: “Stop, stop, stop… calm down… don’t pull… that’s not what I meant… we can talk about this, but you need to calm down first. You can’t just decide to be resealed by saying it out loud…”

But the mummified corpse clearly was not listening. He kept howling like a ghost. The racket he made sounded as lively as a steam?engine core room. He rattled on about “resealing,” “give me a rope,” “hang me from the mast,” and other such nonsense, the very picture of torn reason and emotional corruption.

To be honest, after half a minute of this, Ted Riel actually started to miss his “lovely” students. Even though they often looked at him with clear but foolish eyes, the worst thing they ever did in class was fall asleep.

That was much quieter than this.

Luckily, the noisy mummified corpse did not keep it up for long. Just when Ted Riel was truly starting to think about taking Anomaly 077’s suggestion and beating him half to death, the cabin door opened.

Lawrence, still wrapped in faint green flames, pushed the door open and came in.

The anomaly who had been crying and wailing a moment before fell silent at once. He grinned and greeted the captain, then vanished from the room almost in the blink of an eye.

Ted Riel stared, stunned, in the direction the “sailor” had gone.

After a long moment, he finally turned his head toward Lawrence. “I never thought that the ‘sailor’ who struck fear into so many mariners would be like this after going into a runaway state…”

Lawrence looked surprised. “You’ve never met Miss Alice?”

“…All right, Captain, sir, you have a point,” Ted Riel said after thinking it over. He waved a hand. “Anything that gets mixed up with the Vanished seems to turn… unbelievable.”

“Yes, unbelievable, but at least not bad,” Lawrence said with a smile as he walked over. “Don’t mind that neurotic mummified corpse, and don’t take his talk about resealing too seriously. He’s just putting on a show. At first he really did try to run away from the Mortal Realm, but now he’s actually quite comfortable on this ship. He just refuses to admit it.”

“It sounds like you know Anomaly 077 very well.”

“A captain’s duty and basic skill,” Lawrence replied. “I have to know everyone on my ship. That fellow is included.” He sat down beside Ted Riel and glanced over his “temporary passenger’s” face. “How do you feel, Your Excellency Truth Keeper?”

“I can still hear faint noise in my head from time to time, but it’s much better than before,” Ted Riel said with a sigh. “The biggest problem now is the mess of memories crawling through my mind. So many scenes… real ones, fake ones, ones twisted by self?protection. It’s hard to tell which ones I can trust. I feel like I’ve been traveling through that dark place for a century… but you’re telling me I was only gone from Lightwind Harbor for a little more than ten minutes?”

“Yes, a little more than ten minutes, Your Excellency Truth Keeper,” Lawrence said with a nod. “When we fished you out, you had only been missing from the teleportation gate for a short while. So we very much want to know what exactly you went through in that ‘short while’.”

“‘We’?” Ted Riel had sharp ears. He did not miss that word.

“I just spoke with my boss. He already knows what happened here,” Lawrence said. “The Truth Keeper ‘vanishing’ has caused some chaos in Lightwind Harbor. Thankfully, the White Oak found you before that chaos could spread too far. As for the city, you don’t need to worry too much. While the Vanished is near that city, there is no place on the Boundless Sea safer than Lightwind Harbor. As for you…”

The old captain paused and thought for a moment before going on: “We still don’t know how much this last extinguishing of the Sun has changed the world. Trying to open a spatial passage again could be very dangerous. So you should stay on this ship for now and rest. While you have the time, tell me what you saw in that ‘darkness’. He is very interested in it.”

Ted Riel’s face slowly grew serious.

After a short silence, he looked into the old captain’s eyes and said: “You should already know that my experience is tied to Subspace. That knowledge is not safe.”

Lawrence shrugged. “My boss is tied to Subspace too. He is much less safe than your knowledge.”

Ted Riel thought about it and had to admit the man was right.

“…All right. Where should I start?”

“Let’s start with what you just mentioned while you were still half conscious,” Lawrence said. “That inverted manor floating in the darkness…”

…

“Ted Riel is lucky, in a way. He survived Subspace, and he’s recovering fairly well,” Duncan said. “Right now he’s on the White Oak, telling Lawrence about those unbelievable experiences. It may not be long before we receive some shocking information about Subspace.”

Duncan ended his link with the White Oak for the moment and turned his attention back to Lightwind Harbor. He roughly explained the situation Lawrence had sent to him so far, then looked over at Lucretia.

“From what we know now, his experience was not the same as mine.”

“…After all, he was only ‘gone’ for fifteen minutes, while you spent a century in Subspace,” Lucretia said, her expression clearly complicated. “Just fifteen minutes was enough to tear at a Saint’s sanity and almost turn him into a Subspace rift… and he was once able to hold out to the very end under Atlantis’s influence…”

“Thankfully, the only loss on the White Oak’s side was that Anomaly 077 took a punch,” Duncan said, waving his hand. He quickly changed the subject. “Before more news comes from over there, let’s focus on the world after the Sun went out… Lucy, I want to know what that strange ‘signal’ really was.”