Chapter 699

Chapter 699: Lonely Vigil.

After hearing the Tomb Guardian’s answer, Duncan did not speak for a long time. The answer was shocking, yet for some reason it felt as if he had already… expected it in some way.

“…The ‘Creator’ you keep mentioning, is that the Crawling King? Or rather… the Lord of Abyssal Deep?”

“We usually call him ‘Navigator One’,” the Tomb Guardian slowly lowered his head and said, “or ‘Cluster Controller’. But we also know the names ‘Crawling King’ and ‘Lord of Abyssal Deep’. Those came up in reports the Doomsday Survey Team sent back from a certain time node.”

The tall Gravekeeper fell silent for a few seconds after saying this. Then he spoke again, softly, as if talking to himself: “We also have not received any news from the Creator for a very long time.”

Duncan did not answer. Chaotic thoughts filled his mind. After a short moment of thinking, he lifted his head and fixed his gaze on the body on the throne: “So, during the third Long Night, ‘Navigator One’ gathered part of the King of Dreams’ remains, then used his special divine authority of ‘copying’ to design the Critt race after the King of Dreams as a template, to make them his assistants… The entire Critt race was ‘made’ this way? Including the Doomsday Survey Teams?”

“Of course,” the Gravekeeper said in a calm tone. “The world was still very chaotic back then. The Creator had briefly released some mortals into the still-unformed Sanctuary World, but found that they could not survive there and were far from useful. So he could only seek help from beings as powerful as himself. Saslokar, who had died earlier in the process of the Genesis Protocol, was the most suitable choice.”

Duncan quietly listened to the Gravekeeper’s explanation, but the look on his face grew more and more strange. He suddenly realized that if he followed this fact to its end… then did that not mean all the Enders could be counted as Saslokar’s “spawn”?!

This strange and shocking thought flashed through his mind. Duncan suddenly went blank for a moment, and then could not help linking it to something else—

Those mad “Preachers” had become wildly excited the moment they saw the Vanished and even called it the “Promised Ark”… The main reason behind that was of course that the Vanished had once entered Subspace and returned intact. But could it also… have something to do with the fact that the current Vanished was actually built on Saslokar’s “Elder God spine”?!

Could the madness and frenzy of those Enders actually be some kind of stress reaction that “spawn” had when they drew close to an “Elder God”?!

Once these shocking connections appeared, they were hard to stop. Duncan’s thoughts raced far away in an instant. Only after a long while did his focus slowly pull back and fall once more on the throne and the headless body before him.

He remembered something the Gravekeeper had said to him before they entered the tomb.

“You said he did not have much time left… You meant this body does not have much time left?”

“He has kept watch here for a very long time, but the maintenance systems here cannot run forever,” the Gravekeeper said in a low voice. “The ancient systems the Creator left behind are all developing problems one after another. They have been in service far beyond their limits. This throne once served as the starting point for one thousand two hundred observation posts and upheld the ‘existence’ of all Critt. But now this place has become the last observation post, and the throne’s operation is also about to reach its end.”

Duncan suddenly frowned: “…What will happen when the throne stops running?”

The Gravekeeper stayed silent for a moment, then slowly said: “It will mean that the first pillar system the Creator left behind has completely collapsed. After that, the fourth Long Night will begin.”

The fourth Long Night!

Duncan’s eyes changed slightly. After so many scattered and messy clues, this was the first time he had received such a clear piece of information, the first time he could confirm what the key node would be when the fourth Long Night came!

And the Gravekeeper had just said that all the ancient systems the Creator left behind were failing. The collapse of the throne was clearly only one of them. Vision 001—the Sun—was without a doubt another system on the verge of its limit… This matched what was already known!

Duncan’s brow furrowed tightly, and his thoughts churned within him—

By common sense, when the first “collapse” appeared in a series of interlinked, complex systems, a chain reaction was sure to follow. In other words, once the throne here stopped running, the malfunctions and final shutdown of the Sun would also speed up…

Every Long Night began with the great collapse at the end of the previous one, and the third Long Night had been no exception. The collapse of the throne and the shutdown of the tomb of the Nameless King, the last Critt observation post, would start it. After that, the Sun would speed toward its own collapse amid a chain of failures until it went out forever, and the whole world would sink into the veil of night…

The Gravekeeper before him clearly knew many things, some even beyond the age he himself lived in, beyond the Time-Stream up to now. Those pieces of information… perhaps came from the Doomsday Survey Teams that had set out so long ago and watched over the entire Sanctuary World within the Time-Stream…

Thinking of the Gravekeeper who had brought him here, Duncan’s thoughts spread out again:

This Gravekeeper and the tomb he warded had already existed in this chaotic gap for ten thousand years. But from what Vanna had revealed, the tomb of the Nameless King had never held such rational, positive contact with the outside as it did today. In the eyes of the world, this tomb was the chaotic and dangerous “Vision 004”. Yet now, this Gravekeeper and everything in the tomb seemed very “normal”…

Duncan’s train of thought suddenly stopped. He turned his head, deep in thought, and looked at the tall Gravekeeper standing beside him.

…Was it really normal?

Was this, once again, like those “unnameable” beings he had met before, something only he could hear and see clearly? For all those other “Listeners” who had been led into the tomb, did this Tomb Guardian and the ancient plaza ruin at the end of the corridor look completely different?

Duncan remembered the “Cognitive Shift model” Rune had brought up at the gathering not long ago. After thinking for a moment, he could not help asking: “Will the others who enter the tomb see the same things I see?”

“…I try my best to blind their senses and clear away the harmful parts of their memories before they leave. Mortals should not see too many things. It is harmful to them.”

Duncan nodded slowly.

The Gravekeeper’s answer did not fully match what he had expected, but it already indirectly confirmed his guess.

The world he saw was not the same as the one an ordinary person saw. The more things involved “Anomalies” and “Visions”, the stronger this “shift effect” became.

Duncan let out a light breath and set these tangled questions aside for now. After a brief silence, he suddenly asked: “How long is left?”

The Tomb Guardian turned his head: “Hm?”

Duncan lifted his head and pointed at the tall, dark throne: “I mean, how much longer can this throne keep running?”

“I cannot be sure. I am only a Warden, and the Scholars who understood this complex system have been gone for a very long time. The only answer I can give you is… soon.”

“What will happen to this body after the throne stops running?”

This time the Tomb Guardian did not answer at all. He only shook his head in silence.

Duncan did not press further. He and the Gravekeeper simply stood there in silence, in the ruins lit by the dusk-colored sky. After an unknown stretch of time, Duncan suddenly asked: “I heard the bell… Was it because this place is already near its limit? Were you the one actively calling me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” Duncan turned his head, his expression puzzled and serious. “What do you hope I will do?”

To his surprise, the Gravekeeper shook his head: “I do not know.”

“You do not know?”

“I am only a Warden. The ones who understood everything and knew everything have been gone for a very long time,” the Gravekeeper said, fixing his gaze on Duncan’s eyes. “But I still remember one thing… only one thing.”

He turned around and looked toward the wide ruins in the distance, toward the phantoms that sometimes appeared at the edge of the plaza, hurriedly passing through many gates and slipping in and out of the timeline. Then he spoke softly:

“When they had just set out, a message came from the most distant, most impossible Time Boundary and reached here almost in an instant. It was a single sentence from a Doomsday surveyor who claimed to have already trekked to the very end—

“He said that dusk had fallen, and that the bearer of the Flame Usurper had set this world alight.”

Duncan stayed silent. As he listened to the Gravekeeper, he hid all his feelings in eyes as deep and calm as water. No one knew what he was thinking at that moment.

But the Gravekeeper clearly did not mind. He simply went on calmly: “I do not know what you will think after seeing all of this, and I do not know what you will do on some day in the future. Even more, I do not know what effect the things I have told you today will have on some action or decision you make in the future.

“My duty is only to ward this station and, according to ancient agreements, activate it from time to time so that it can carry out limited data exchange with the outside world. We are a race that was carefully designed and created. Every one of us exists only to complete limited and necessary tasks, and strictly speaking, bringing you here does not fall within my duties.

“But the ones who were in charge of assigning tasks are gone, and there has been no news of the Creator for a very long time. So I feel that I should at least… do something.”

“…I understand,” Duncan let out a quiet breath. At some point his face had relaxed. He looked at the Gravekeeper and nodded slowly and seriously. “Thank you for telling me so much. To know what once happened is already a great gain for me.”

“Then that is good.”