Chapter 721

Chapter 721: Crossing the dome

That unreal, ethereal voice vanished at once, as if it had never existed.

In the dark “tunnel,” Alice blinked, puzzled by what she had just heard. She suspected she had misheard it, but…

The captain had said that in strange places like this, no matter what you heard or saw, you had to report it right away, even if it was just a hallucination.

So she quickly squeezed Duncan’s arm: “Captain, I just heard a voice!”

“A voice?” Duncan turned his head at once. In the darkness, he fixed his gaze on the doll’s eyes. “What voice?”

Alice immediately repeated what she had heard—including that short, unrecognizable burst of noise, and the strange “name” LH-03, “Navigator Three.”

In the dark, endless tunnel, Duncan slowly widened his eyes. He looked at the doll before him with a very strange, shocked expression, and then a trace of understanding suddenly rose in his gaze.

So that was it… it was like this?!

As a storm of tangled thoughts and staggering guesses surged through his mind, he understood many things in an instant. Almost at the same time, he noticed something bright and dense at the edge of his vision.

Still stunned, Duncan snapped his head around and looked toward where the light had appeared.

A second later, he saw the “Starry Sky” that lay on the dome above the Abyssal Deep, above the Deep Sea—

Magnificent starlight appeared at the end of the “tunnel.” It was a vast scene woven from thousands of stars, stellar nurseries, and high-energy radiation clouds. A river of stars crossed boundless darkness. A massive, erupting celestial body had been torn apart into glowing nebulae spread across the galaxy. All of it formed an endless, splendid Veil that swept into Duncan’s and Alice’s vision like a crashing tide.

Duncan’s eyes flew wide open.

This was the “Starry Sky” that every captain who sailed the Boundless Sea knew well. It lay between the Spirit Realm and the Abyssal Deep Sea. Under normal conditions, one could only “look down” on it through complex Spirit Realm lenses, as a great Star Map. Seafarers in the mortal world could only cast cautious glances at it from behind thick lenses and layers of protection. But here, the truest face of this Starry Sky and every tiny detail of it appeared directly before his eyes.

Duncan and Alice “fell” faster toward that frozen Starry Sky. Pulled by an unseen force, they were quickly entering the dome layer above the Abyssal Deep, above the Deep Sea.

They plunged into the starlight and began to pass swiftly between those motionless celestial bodies.

After a brief hesitation, Duncan reached out toward the unfamiliar stars.

A bright orange-yellow star passed through his palm like a phantom. At the same time, tiny points of starlight appeared on his skin, yet the two clearly did not affect each other.

Then he suddenly noticed how quiet Alice was beside him. Normally, this doll would already be shouting and chattering at the sight of such a magnificent Starry Sky.

But Alice only stared wide-eyed at the surroundings, as if something else had captured all of her attention. The brilliant lights were reflected in her deep purple eyes, dancing there with a lively gleam. After quite a while, the doll suddenly raised her hand and pointed in a direction, mumbling like someone talking in her sleep: “Coordinates offset.”

Duncan frowned: “What did you say?”

It was as if Alice had not heard the captain at all. She still kept her gaze on the stars around them, then lifted her hand again and pointed another way: “Coordinates offset.”

“Coordinates offset. Coordinates offset. Coordinates offset…”

Alice spoke faster and faster. Her eyes swept constantly across the stars, as if trying to find some “reference” that could help her fix her bearings. Duncan was just about to forcefully “wake her up” when she suddenly stopped. She jolted as if snapping out of a heavy dream and turned blankly toward Duncan: “…Report, navigation system failure.”

She went still, and seemed a bit more clear-headed than before. She patted her head, then scratched her hair in confusion: “Ah… Captain, my head just suddenly filled up with all kinds of strange things…”

Duncan grabbed Alice’s arm. Thin threads of flame flowed over his fingertips as he lowered his voice and asked gently: “What did you see?”

“Stars… lines between the stars, and numbers and symbols,” Alice answered, still with a hint of daze in her eyes, as if part of her mind was still busy with something else. “I was supposed to find a path and avoid those collapsing gravity traps… but the coordinates are off. We… we don’t have a safe route…”

Confused, she lifted her head and looked around at the Starry Sky. Those motionless stars seemed to record a distant journey. Long ago, in some universe that had already died, there had once been such a scene. She had once passed through here, guiding the last refugees as they searched for a path of escape… But escape… escape from what?

A spreading glow of dark red appeared in her mind.

The whole universe was red-shifting… the stars were coming apart, physical space was collapsing… the structure of matter was falling to pieces… the servo systems were howling at the edge of failure…

The ship was about to break apart. The navigation cabin had already caught fire… Activate Disaster Backup Protocol.

Alice’s eyes flew open. The chaotic noise in her head was wiped away in an instant by some powerful force. She shook her head. Her neck joint creaked slightly—and she forgot all the messy things that had filled her mind.

A warm flame burned quietly at her side. The power in the fire slowly steadied her thoughts. She turned her head and saw the captain standing beside her, watching her with concern: “Alice, don’t start overthinking yet.”

Alice thought for a moment, then shook her head in confusion: “Captain, I feel like I just saw something… but I forgot!”

“I know, but it’s all right. Forgetting is fine,” Duncan said softly as he patted Alice’s arm. “We’re about to go find the answers.”

“…Oh.” Alice nodded, half understanding and half not.

Duncan said nothing more. While he carefully maintained the flame to protect Alice’s mind, he fixed his heavy gaze on the depths of this star river.

A chain of information rose in his thoughts and slowly linked together—

Here was a frozen “holographic snapshot” of the stars. Through the long ages of the past, it had floated in the dome layer above the Abyssal Deep, above the Deep Sea, providing navigation for all the world’s mariners.

The master of the Abyssal Deep Sea, the Abyssal Lord, was called Navigator One, code LH-01.

When Alice stepped through the “black door,” she had briefly heard a voice that called her LH-03, Navigator Three.

The God of Wisdom, Rahm, had a true name: LH-02, Navigator Two. The image of that god in the scriptures always made Duncan think of a huge server, its surface flickering with countless lights.

Ten thousand years ago, a starship called the New Hope had crashed into this “ruined world.” It had tried to flee the Doomsday of its home universe, but in the final stage of its voyage, it had still broken apart and split into three pieces…

Three pieces, just enough to match three modular “hosts”…

Duncan let out a slow breath. He forced the storm of thoughts in his mind to calm down and glanced from the corner of his eye at the doll walking obediently beside him.

Now… he finally knew what the Abyssal Lord’s replicant had stuffed into this doll’s body back then, in the Deep Sea near Frostholm.

The starlight ahead gradually thinned to nothing. Beyond the dome layer lay countless shattered floating islands drifting in a dark, chaotic space.

The Abyssal Deep—the Deep Sea.

A black skeletal limb, covered in countless vicious barbs, dropped from the sky and nailed a writhing lump of flesh to the stone ground. The deformed mass swelled and squirmed as it ran, but now it was pinned in place.

That Abyssal demon, called a fear demon, let out a series of sharp, hideous shrieks. No matter how it struggled, it could not pull itself off the skeletal spike. In almost the blink of an eye, it shriveled like a punctured balloon. Thick, murky smoke rose from its surface, while what remained melted into sticky “sludge” and was quickly absorbed by the black limb.

The towering skeletal limb bent upward. At the center of twelve symmetrical limbs, a massive Abyssal demon that still kept a partly human, female shape slowly lifted her head.

Shirley calmly swept her gaze over the many broken remains on this barren land—the torn bodies of Abyssal Hounds, the death-omen birds still twitching and flapping on the ground, the Smokewisp Jellyfish and fear demon that were slowly turning into sludge, and that black skull floating crookedly in the sky, the red glow in its eye sockets flickering faintly.

Farther away, more Abyssal demons were gathering, lingering in hesitation.

Abyssal demons had no hearts. But even a demon without a heart still had some instinct to seek advantage and avoid harm—at the very least, none of them had come here just to be eaten by a stronger demon.

Shirley moved her twelve long limbs, as if she were walking across the ground on bent bone wings. She slowly headed toward the far end of the barren plain. From time to time, a badly wounded demon failed to get out of the way and was skewered by one of her long “legs,” turning into sludge that was drawn up and absorbed as nourishment.

At first, she had felt nothing but disgust about this. She had tried to step only on the clean ground, doing her best to avoid “eating” that revolting mud.

But now she no longer cared that much.

“Shirley… relax…”

She only muttered softly as she walked through the ranks of mangled demons, moving toward a direction she felt was right.

The battered black skull darted sideways in near terror, getting out of the path of this strange intruder.

But Shirley did not spare that skull even a single second of attention.

She just kept murmuring as she walked on: “…Don’t be afraid.”

On the plain, the demons drew back in fear and opened a path.