Chapter 716

Chapter 716: Crossing of Real and Unreal

From the entrance, the passage first ran downward along a narrow, low slope. Rough tool marks showed clearly on the surrounding rock walls. But after they walked more than ten meters, the passage ahead began to widen, and the slope grew a little gentler.

ghostly green fire spread along the rocks. Its glow lit the way ahead. Duncan looked at the corridor stretching on into the darkness, and his brow slowly furrowed.

“Did those cultists dig all of this in just a few days after the Sun went out?” Duncan could not help looking at Shirley as he asked: “In such a short time, they dug a passage this deep?”

“No. They only dug open the entrance to this passage, and then broke through the stones at the very bottom,” Shirley shook her head. “This stretch under our feet seems to have already been here before…”

“A passage that already existed deep under this ‘Holy Land Island’?” Morris frowned at once. He walked to the rock wall ahead, studied the stone around them and the ground under his feet, then spoke in a thoughtful tone: “So before those cultists found this place, someone else had already been digging here…”

He suddenly stopped talking and frowned in confusion. A moment later he slowly lifted his head and looked along the path lit by the faint green flame.

“No. It doesn’t look like something dug by people… This ‘original passage’ was made by something else…”

Duncan stepped forward when he heard that and asked: “What did you find?”

“Look at the marks on these rock layers,” Morris raised his hand and pointed at the walls around them. “These smooth, rolling fractures and the ring patterns spaced so evenly along the rock… They don’t look man-made.”

Duncan at once noticed the strange traces on the rock walls that Morris had mentioned.

He saw that the walls of the corridor ahead were smooth. The black and gray stone looked hard, as if some sharp thing had sliced all of it at once, leaving a continuous, clean shape. Every three meters or so, a raised ring of stone wrapped all the way around the passage. The floor under his feet was flat and gently sloped. Large and small stones were fitted together as if someone had carved them with great care and set them into the slope with no gaps at all.

These were not marks that the cultists’ tools or their demons’ spells could have made. They were clearly not the “results of excavation” by anyone before them either.

Even the city-states of today had no underground digging or building skills like this.

Morris slowly ran his fingers along the smooth rock walls on both sides and muttered under his breath: “We’re walking inside a huge pipe…”

“…Back then, under Frostholm, some parts of the Great Hollow also looked like this,” Duncan said in a low voice. “In the end, the scholars in the city-state could not explain how those smooth, flat fractures were formed. They could only say they were ‘corruption hollows’ left behind after the flesh of the Abyssal Lord faded away. But this Holy Land Island… the whole thing is a piece of the Abyssal Lord. So why would there be ‘corruption hollows’ inside it?”

Shirley had been listening to Morris and the captain talk. Suddenly a wild thought flashed through her mind: “…Maybe this is the Abyssal Lord’s rectum?”

The moment she said that, everything went silent. Duncan and Morris both went even darker in the face than Shirley’s ghostly light. Duncan glared hard at the young lady: “You could at least say it’s a blood vessel!”

Shirley shrank her neck without thinking. She scratched her hair and tried to act calm as she changed the subject: “A blood vessel also seems pretty likely, heh…”

Duncan did not keep arguing with Shirley. After he blurted out that last sentence, he fell into thought again and frowned.

A blood vessel… an internal pipe?

If this Holy Land Island really was, as Shirley had said, a “piece of an Elder Gods’ body,” then would this piece of flesh truly have “blood vessels” and “nerves” inside it? If it did… would they really look like this “passage” in front of him?

Duncan followed that line of thought without meaning to. In his mind he tried to picture what kind of shape the Abyssal Lord might have, what kind of “body structure” it might hold. Just then, he suddenly noticed that Alice had not said a word for a long time.

Normally, when the doll young lady followed the captain into some strange new place, she would chatter nonstop. But today she was unusually quiet.

“Alice.” Duncan felt something was off. He at once looked at the doll standing beside him, who seemed a bit lost in thought, and asked: “What are you thinking about?”

He had to call her twice before Alice suddenly jolted as if waking from a dream. She turned her head in a hurry: “Eh… huh? Captain, what did you say?”

“I asked what you were thinking—just now you seemed to be spacing out the whole time.” Duncan frowned slightly. He looked into Alice’s eyes with some worry. “Did you see or hear something again?”

Alice looked around in confusion. She hesitated for quite a while before she finally answered Duncan very carefully: “I haven’t seen anything yet… But I don’t know why. After we walked here, I suddenly felt… very familiar.”

Duncan and Morris spoke at the same time: “A familiar feeling?”

“Yes. Familiar, safe, like…” Alice waved her hands for a long time before she finally found the right words. “Like lying inside my wooden box.”

As she spoke, she lifted her hand and pointed into the darker depths of the corridor: “And in that direction, the familiar feeling is even stronger. It’s like… I came to this place a long time ago, or… I stayed here for a very long time…”

Duncan listened to Alice’s description with a serious face. After a moment he nodded lightly: “We’ll keep going deeper. Alice, Shirley, Dog, no matter what strange thing you see or hear, tell me right away.”

With growing caution in their hearts, the group started walking farther into the passage that seemed to have no end.

The flames spread slowly along the corridor. After they walked for an unknown length of time, Duncan noticed that the space around them suddenly grew wider.

They seemed to have entered a huge underground cavity. The pipe-like passage on both sides suddenly opened out into broad rock walls. The ceiling above rose to more than ten meters in height. For a moment, the suddenly widened space fell into darkness. But after only a second or two, ghost-green flame raced out over the ground and began to light this wide place.

Shirley tipped her head back, staring in amazement at this underground cavern that looked like a huge hall for gatherings. Even though she had caught a quick glimpse of it in the “illusion” before, she still could not help gasping when she saw it with her own eyes: “…Holy crap…”

“…Now I suddenly think Vanna could come too,” Duncan rubbed his chin, lost in thought. “This place looks big enough for her to jump in as well…”

Morris said nothing. The old scholar’s attention was already fully taken by this strange cave full of secrets. He walked slowly along the path lit by the spirit flame, studying his surroundings with care. Then he suddenly stopped in front of a rock wall.

“There’s something on this wall!”

Duncan hurried over, and a scene like a “relief carving” came into view.

On the dark stone wall, a creature with strong limbs, a long body, and a crawling pose seemed almost alive.

Shirley and Dog followed close behind. They stood with Duncan, staring at the “relief” on the wall.

After quite a while, Duncan finally heard Shirley mutter in a low voice: “…Is that a Abyssal Hound?”

“It kind of is…” Dog’s voice sounded very unsure. “But it doesn’t look much like me… This one seems to have flesh, and the body’s proportions aren’t right…”

Before it finished speaking, Morris called again from ahead: “There’s more over here!”

Following Morris’s lead, Duncan saw a second relief.

This one showed a creature floating in midair, shaped like a jellyfish. But it was not made of smoke and dust. It had a solid body, more delicate tentacles, and even on its “head” there seemed to be organs that looked like eyes.

Duncan slowly lifted his head. In the glow of the spirit flame, more reliefs appeared in bits and pieces, set into the rock walls of the cavern. They seemed to stretch on without end at the edge of his sight.

He frowned a little and stepped toward another relief—

A trembling gleam appeared at the edge of his vision.

Duncan stopped at once.

At almost the same moment, the light and shadow before his eyes changed.

Everything suddenly turned into collapsing, scattered fragments of light. The dark cavern and the ancient, mysterious reliefs fell apart in silence before him. In the next instant, the falling shards of light swirled back together, gathered, reshaped, lit up, and appeared again—

In a soundless “roar,” he saw a hall. A hall that seemed to have no end. It formed itself with a rush before Duncan’s eyes.

He saw some silver-gray substance of unknown make spread through his view and turn into a solid floor. Dark blue glowing lines of some mysterious pattern ran all across that floor. High above, the dome blazed with lights. Huge pipes and cables crossed and twisted over the dome like nerves and blood vessels.

Inside this hall stood one round platform after another.

Those platforms gave off a faint glow. Above each one, some invisible field seemed to hang in the air, holding many things frozen in stillness. There were strong, four-legged hound-like creatures, hunting beasts, all kinds of birds, and many shapes he did not know at all and could not see clearly.

The light before his eyes flickered. The lamps in the hall dimmed and brightened. In the blink of an eye, Duncan felt as if he saw the dark cavern again, and the neat rows of “reliefs” on the rock walls—

But in the next second, the dim cavern collapsed again into the form of that hall. He saw something standing at the far end ahead. It was like a huge machine, or some kind of… terminal. Countless pipes gathered around a complex prismatic structure. In the pipes flowed a metallic, black sludge. Lights flashed on the prism that served as the core. Something like a holographic image floated in front of it, lines of text refreshing over and over.

The letters were strange. Duncan did not know that writing at all—but with just one glance, the meaning of the words seemed to sink straight into his mind—

“…the New Hope… main system offline…

“LH-01, Navigator One, ecosystem reconstruction mainframe… status: anomaly.

“LH-02, Navigator Two, data and master-control mainframe… status: anomaly.

“LH-03, Navigator Three, Navigation Mainframe… offline.

“Starship has disintegrated…”

—