Chapter 693

Chapter 693: Shadows Noticed Afterward

“One third of the structure?”

Ted froze when he heard Duncan’s words. He looked in confusion at the messy, abstract lines he had drawn. To be honest, he thought his drawing was terrible, but it was already the closest he could get to his “original impression”. The lingering influence of Subspace had been disturbing his mind for a long time, so he still could not clearly recall the details of those memories. Even he could barely piece a complete image out of these broken lines.

Yet from Duncan’s tone, he realized that this ghost captain had not only recognized what was on the paper. Duncan even knew what the thing was supposed to look like.

Duncan stood at the table, frowning as he studied the details Ted had drawn. After a while, he pointed at a spot on the drawing: “Is the structure broken here?”

Ted frowned and forced himself to remember. At last a vague image rose in his mind: “I think so… but I’m not sure. I only glanced at it in a rush. I didn’t even have time to see the full side of the structure…”

“It breaks here, then extends outward. These are some connecting structures,” Duncan said, not minding the doubt in Ted’s voice. He picked up the pencil and quickly drew lines in the blank space of the paper. Under his hand, a strange thing with a three-part symmetrical body took shape. To Ted and Lucretia, it looked nothing like any ‘ship’ at all. “It is made of three main structures like this… Here is where the engine group sits…”

Without realizing it, Lucretia had leaned close to the strange “drawing”. She stared at it for a full half minute before she finally could not hold back: “What… is this exactly?”

Duncan did not raise his head. After a few seconds of silence, he answered softly: “It is called the New Hope.”

Lucretia and Ted exchanged looks, then spoke in unison: “The New Hope?”

Alice also came over, a beat late, and asked: “What is the New Hope?”

Duncan lifted his head. His complicated, strange gaze fell on this brother doll, but she did not seem to notice at all. She only tilted her head: “Why are you looking at me?”

“…It was a ship. A starship,” Duncan took back his gaze and spoke in a low voice, his tone so subtle he himself was not sure what he felt. “Many, many years ago, it reached this world. Or rather, like the other ‘fragments’, it crashed into this heap of World Wreckage we live in.”

“A starship? A ship that flies?” Ted sounded shocked, then he reacted: “You mean another ‘world fragment’? A flying ship called the New Hope, and part of its wreckage fell into Subspace and turned into the mansion I saw…?”

He raised his hand and made a vague shape in the air, his face full of disbelief.

But Duncan did not answer the Truth Keeper’s question. He only lowered his head again and stared at the drawing on the table for a long time. On top of Ted’s sketch, his simple lines had outlined a rough picture of a great starship. It was far from a full copy, but it was clearly the same New Hope he had once seen in a vision, dragging a long trail of fire as it fell into this world.

He still remembered how he had seen that vision in the first place.

It had been when he checked Alice’s wind-up key. He had spread his own flames into the brass key. Just like every time he used this method to probe an extraordinary item, he had seen the “echo” left inside that wind-up key.

In that “echo”, Alice’s wind-up key had turned into some strange kind of data storage medium, and the New Hope had crashed in the final scene of the vision.

For a long time, he had been looking for clues about that starship. He had searched for any legends or records in this world that might be linked to some ancient crash. At the same time, he often wondered about one question.

Why would the vision of the New Hope’s crash be recorded inside Alice’s wind-up key?

What connection could this harmless brother doll have with a starship that had already crashed in the Age of Antiquity?

The gap between a “doll” and a “starship” was so huge that even Duncan’s imagination could not link them. Yet now, an even more unbelievable clue had appeared before him.

Ted had seen Alice’s mansion in Subspace. At certain moments, that mansion had taken on the shape of one third of the New Hope’s wreckage!

Duncan had questioned Ted’s memory and description at first, but he quickly ruled that out. Ted could not describe something he had never seen out of nowhere. Even if his memory was mixed up, he could not “happen” to sketch the New Hope’s ship structure in that confusion.

Some scattered and broken clues seemed to be quietly linking together. Some wild guesses rose in Duncan’s mind.

As his thoughts surged, Duncan reached into the inner pocket of his coat and felt out the brass key he used to wind Alice.

The brass key lay quietly in his palm. The cold metal end of the key took the classic “?” shape, as if it hid all its secrets inside endless silence.

After a moment, he put the key away. When he looked up, he met Lucretia’s and Ted’s curious yet hesitant gazes.

“Let’s talk about something else first,” Duncan shook his head and looked at Ted. “What else did you see in Subspace?”

Ted nodded. He realized that the New Hope might point to some secret that was too ancient and dangerous, so he wisely held back his curiosity. Instead, he went on describing the unbelievable sights he had seen in Subspace.

There were giant things standing on barren plains, a throne and a huge headless figure, an unnamed warrior who had died leaning against wreckage, and many other strange sights. He could not tell which of them were real and which came from his own mind.

Duncan did not interrupt again. He listened with full attention, nodding from time to time. Only when Ted finally finished did he let out a long breath.

The headless corpse on the throne, the unknown warrior beside strange wreckage, the huge structure on the wasteland… All of these were indeed bizarre. But in Subspace, anything might appear. At least in Duncan’s eyes, all of these were easier to accept than “Alice’s mansion exists in Subspace” and “Alice’s mansion is part of the New Hope”.

“…That was quite a journey. It’s hard to forget,” Lucretia said at last, breaking the quiet after listening quietly for a long time. “Fifteen minutes… Mr. Ted, those fifteen minutes of yours are enough for many scholars to study for a lifetime.”

“I could use those fifteen minutes to write academic papers for the rest of my life, but to be honest, I would rather never have had that experience,” Ted sighed. “You know, even now I can still sometimes hear that buzzing noise in my head. It moves around inside my awareness like a living thing. Even though I’ve had strict training in resilient psychology and Will-Control Theory, it is still unusually hard to resist this noise. And this aftereffect may last for a long time…”

He shrugged as he said this, his face looking a little bad.

“And what’s worse is that I have to go back to the academy tomorrow and face those stubborn students. Their clear yet foolish views on academic matters are like another kind of ‘Subspace noise’ to me…”

The Truth Keeper murmured this and raised his hand to press his forehead in pain. The lingering echo of Subspace and the foreseeable shadows of the future were clearly mixing together, casting a deep shadow in his heart.

Seeing this, Duncan had no idea how to comfort him. He could only sigh softly and pat Ted on the shoulder: “I understand that feeling very well.”

Ted was a little surprised. He looked up at Duncan in confusion: “How would you understand?”

Duncan paused for a moment. It felt hard to explain, but soon Shirley’s homework notebook and Alice’s doodle book floated up in his mind.

“…On my ship there are people who are even ‘clearer’ than your students.”

Ted stared blankly for a moment. He did not know how much he understood, but he still nodded with a complicated look: “It seems… things aren’t easy for you either.”

Then he grew quiet, as if he felt tired after recalling Subspace for so long and wanted to let his mind rest. But in less than half a minute, he suddenly seemed to remember something else.

“There’s something else,” Ted lifted his head, his expression turning serious. “It’s not about Subspace. It’s about… the White Oak.”

“The White Oak?” Duncan looked a bit puzzled. “What about that ship?”

“…I don’t know if it was just my imagination. After all, I was under the influence of Subspace at the time, and my senses and thoughts were a mess. But I kept feeling that something was off when I was talking with that ‘Sailor’ on the White Oak.”

Duncan’s expression turned serious as he listened.

“Sailor… You mean the Anomaly numbered 077? What was wrong with him?”

“I can’t put it into words. But after I came back here, when I thought about how it felt to talk to that Anomaly, I kept feeling that I wasn’t only talking to ‘him’ at the time,” Ted frowned, choosing his words as he tried to remember. “I talked with him about how he saw the world, about the viewpoint of an Anomaly looking at the world. When he answered me… I felt like I could hear more than one voice. It was as if something else was also hiding on that ship, right beside that ‘Sailor’.”