Chapter 706

Chapter 706: .

In the fog that filled the whole sea, hanging like endless gauze, the Tide and her two escort ships from the Deep Sea Church began to enter the region illuminated by the spirit flame, the Sacred beacon Torch. Their hulls gradually grew clear in the mist. The outlines that had been trembling and wavering under the influence of the border environment also became steadier in the firelight.

For the sailors aboard the Tide, the changes were even more obvious. The ghostly green flame soaring into the sky was like a lighthouse that brought order. The eternal mist of the border sea actually receded like a sacred miracle around that lighthouse. As they drew closer to the flame, the faint noise and whispering in the surroundings weakened as well. None of this was something these sailors, who had patrolled near the eternal Veil for years, had ever experienced.

On the foredeck of the Vanished, Vanna slightly furrowed her brow and tilted her head in a Listening Rite, as if she were picking out distant sounds from the wind. Then she nodded to Duncan: “Commander Sandra of the Tide sends you his greetings and respects. He is asking about the next step.”

Duncan nodded: “We wait for the Rest and the No Rest to arrive. Then we enter the thick fog. Make sure we do not leave the range lit by the flame lighthouse.”

Vanna immediately passed the captain’s orders to her fellow church members. Duncan, meanwhile, was quite interested in this “psychic communication” of hers that let her contact nearby Deep Sea believers through meditation and prayer. After watching with curiosity for a while, he suddenly seemed to remember something else: “Speaking of which… should we really install a radio set on the Vanished?”

“If you want to use it in safe waters, that’s fine. But if you want to use it on the border… then it won’t be reliable,” Vanna answered very seriously. “In the border sea, the chance of machines going mad is very high. Only machines like steam cores, which have strong protection, can still run stably. Everything else will have problems more or less, and radio is the most likely of all to go wrong.”

As Vanna finished, Lucretia spoke up beside her: “A running radio set can easily pick up ‘voices’ from unknown sources. Those voices will corrupt people’s minds. Some things can even crawl along the radio into the Mortal Realm and quietly corrupt any device that isn’t under steam’s protection. So as a rule, ships entering the border sea shut down their radios, and they even cut the internal phones on board.”

“Something can crawl along the radio into the Mortal Realm?” Duncan raised his eyebrows. He seemed to find this rather… interesting. “So the patrol ships on the border basically have to rely on Vanna’s kind of ‘psychic communication’ to stay in contact?”

“Psychic Resonance is a sacred miracle granted by the God,” Vanna lowered her head slightly and traced the sigil of the storm goddess Gamona on her chest. “Like the steam-blessed boilers, the words sent out through Psychic Resonance are under divine blessing. In this chaotic border sea, they can avoid being corrupted and twisted by outside forces. Of course, this doesn’t mean absolute safety. Psychic communication can still be interfered with and corrupted. In this endless fog, there is no such thing as one hundred percent safety.”

“I see…” Duncan nodded thoughtfully. Just as when he first set foot on the city-states, he absorbed this new knowledge about the border with keen curiosity and a strong desire to understand it. Then he turned his head and casually asked toward what looked like empty air: “What about you, Agatha? Is the ‘psychic communication’ between you, the Rest, and the No Rest the same as Vanna’s? As a ‘shadow’, is there any difference between the psychic communication you use to contact other death priests and the usual kind?”

Agatha’s hazy figure appeared, floating above the deck, and her slightly airy voice came from the air: “As far as I can feel, there is no real difference. Even after becoming like this, I can still feel Bartok’s divine blessing just as in my ‘memories’, and through it I can still hear the voices of my brothers and sisters in the Church. In fact… after coming here, I feel those voices are even clearer than in my ‘memories’. It’s quite unbelievable.”

The “memories” Agatha spoke of clearly referred to her “life as a Gatekeeper”. That life was false, but those memories were a perfect copy of the real Agatha’s. The judgment she made from them naturally had great reference value.

The “replicant Agatha” who existed as a shadow actually felt the voices clearer than in her memories when she listened to psychic communication in the border sea?

This counterintuitive detail made Duncan fall into thought. He had always believed that, in anything involving divine magic and sacred miracles, the replicant Agatha was weaker than her true self left behind in Frostholm. Yet here, in the border sea, the situation… did not seem to match his expectations.

In the end… what were the Four Gods Church’s priests actually handling when they used this power called “Psychic Resonance” to build their web of psychic communication?

Duncan drifted into these thoughts without meaning to, but his thinking was soon interrupted.

“They’re here,” Agatha’s voice came suddenly from the shadow. “The Rest and the No Rest are drawing near.”

A piercing whistle rolled out of the depths of the fog. Two black ironclads with towering bridges, small cathedrals rising at their sterns, and heavy main guns on their bows and flanks slowly emerged from the mist. Four small escort ships surfaced with the swell of the fog around them.

The bright spirit flame rising from the Guide Vessel lit up their blurred silhouettes. In response, the two black ironclads blew their whistles again in greeting and flashed a series of light signals.

“Commander Polly of the Rest and Commander Orlando of the No Rest send you their greetings and respects,” Agatha said, nodding slightly to Duncan. “They have already sent out scout boats to make a rough check of the surrounding sea. They found no trace of Annihilator activity and no small islands suitable as temporary footholds or lookout posts. But inside the Veil, the scout boats did briefly pick up some unusual noise. We can be sure there is indeed ‘something’ in that direction.”

As he listened to Agatha’s report, Duncan’s expression grew more and more serious. Then he exhaled softly and slowly calmed himself.

“Let’s move out. And I’ll say it again: do not leave the area lit by the spirit flame.”

The shattered Guide Vessel began to pick up speed again. With it at their head, the “joint fleet” formed by the Deep Sea Church, the Death Church, and the so-called Vanished Fleet finally sailed toward the eternal Veil and slowly entered the depths of the endless fog.

The sky-filling clouds and mist pressed in like a wall, and at some point turned into layered curtains surrounding the fleet. The Sun was left behind them. sunlight faded from sight. As the fog grew thicker, a kind of chaotic but not completely dark “sky-glow” became the dominant color of this sea within the mist.

About thirty minutes after they crossed the boundary of the Veil, the fog began to “gather” in a clear way and grew denser and denser. It started to take on a… viscous, almost textured form, like chunks of something solid floating unevenly in every corner of their vision.

Dim outlines flashed inside those clumps of condensed fog, as if something were watching this fleet that had suddenly barged into the border sea, quietly observing these uninvited guests.

The deck gradually fell quiet. Even Shirley, who was normally always chattering, seemed to sense the change in the air. She closed her mouth, staring at the “clumps” of fog that flowed past the ship’s side like living things and at the faint shapes in the mist.

“This… this doesn’t look like the ‘fog’ I know at all…” Dog muttered quietly. “It’s not the same as what we saw outside the Veil either…”

“Once you enter the Veil, the texture of the fog turns into this,” Lucretia said. She stood by the rail and reached out, her fingertips gently brushing the streams of fog pouring past like rivers in the air. “It’s as if the order between real and unreal has broken down. The diffuse mist starts to gather into clumps, as if something with a mind of its own is out there, pulling the fog together.”

“But in fact, there is nothing inside them. The centers of these clumps are empty. Don’t trust any ‘solid’ thing you see in the fog too easily. Unless it shows clear signs of activity, it’s best to treat everything as a phantom or your own imagination.”

“Hey, is it really okay to just stick your hand in there like that?” Shirley couldn’t help yelling when she saw Lucretia’s movements. “This fog looks super shady!”

“The fog is dangerous, but that doesn’t mean it’s some kind of corrosive poison,” Lucretia glanced at Shirley and shook her head. “If that were the case, you would have died the moment we entered the Veil. With enough experience and the right methods, the area within six nautical miles of the border counts as a ‘relatively safe zone’… Of course, no matter how careful you are, plenty of people have still died in this so-called ‘relatively safe zone’.”

While listening to Lucretia and Shirley talk, Duncan stayed silent. He simply stood at the bow, watching the streams of fog as they merged and split nearby, his expression thoughtful.

Lucretia noticed Duncan’s silence.

“Dad, did something come to mind?”

Duncan blinked. After a moment’s hesitation, he finally muttered softly: “It looks very familiar.”

“Familiar?” Lucretia echoed.

Duncan grunted in reply, but his gaze did not leave the amorphous clumps drifting all around. He stared at the faint shapes inside the fog, the muddy sky-glow above, and the strange textures that sometimes showed themselves where the clouds flowed. His brow furrowed deeper and deeper…