Chapter 727

Chapter 727: Uncertain, Discontinuous

Amid another series of bone-shifting cracks and rising black smoke, twelve symmetrical black limbs once more stretched and grew out. Dark bone armor slowly covered her body, and bone spikes sharp as blades flashed with a bloody chill. Shirley had changed back into her Abyssal demon form again.

She was adapting at an amazing speed to controlling her two forms. Her control over this body grew more and more natural. The whole process felt less like learning from scratch and more like knowledge that had long soaked into her mind and limbs, and now she was simply “remembering” it bit by bit.

She moved the limbs behind her that helped her walk and flexed her hands and feet. Shirley nodded in satisfaction: “In a place like this, I feel a bit safer like this.”

Dog raised his head and looked at Shirley, who now towered far above him. Then his body was suddenly wrapped in a swirl of smoke. He seemed to melt, shrinking and merging into the shadows beside Shirley.

Duncan watched quietly from the side. When Shirley’s form finally settled, he stepped forward and said: “I thought you would reject your demon body. A transformation this drastic is… pretty shocking to an ordinary person’s worldview.”

“We’re already in the Abyssal Deep, and you still care whether I look good or not?” Shirley poked at a stone on the ground with one of the limbs behind her, looking completely unconcerned. “I’m a… what was that word again? Oh right, a ‘pragmatist’. First I make sure I can stay alive safely, then I think about whether I’m living well. To me, there’s nothing wrong with this demon body. It hits hard and can take a hit. It’s very useful in the Abyssal Deep. If it has any flaw, it’s that it keeps sucking in dead demons’ remains on its own. Ugh… just thinking about it is a little gross…”

As soon as she stopped talking, a dog’s head poked out of the shadows at her feet: “…Actually, I think they taste pretty good. Shirley, are you sure you don’t want to try that bone I brought you?”

Shirley answered without hesitation: “No. It’s nasty!”

Duncan watched them quietly, and at last a faint smile appeared on his face.

“Then the only thing left for us to do is find that ‘Abyssal Lord’,” he said, steering the topic back to the main point. “There are countless floating islands here. This whole space is far larger than I expected. Dog, can you tell where we are exactly?”

The dog’s head poked out of the shadows again. Dog looked around very carefully, then gave the captain a small nod: “This should be the upper layer of the desolate ring belt—the area closest to the starry sky. If I’m right, we need to go ‘down’.”

Duncan looked curious: “Down?”

Dog nodded. After exchanging a few words with Shirley, he walked to the edge of the broken wasteland and leaned out, looking down into the boundless chaotic darkness below.

Below the floating island, in the long stretch of void, the chaotic, dim starlight grew even weaker. Duncan could just make out more floating islands drifting there in confusion. But at the very bottom of all that darkness, he also saw something else… tiny points of light, faintly flickering.

At first, Duncan thought it was another “starry sky” hanging upside down at the bottom of the Abyssal Deep. But he soon realized that those faint points of light were actually lamps, slightly shining on the surface of some structure so huge it was hard to believe.

Those faint lights, almost swallowed by the dark, spread out in the distance. Together they roughly outlined winding, curving branches and a “trunk” in the center of all the branches. The lights on that main trunk were denser, and they moved slowly along it, like something alive.

Standing at the edge of the broken ground, Duncan used his gaze to quietly watch that dim, crowded field of lights. He could not tell how far it was from here to down there, nor how large the “body” behind those lights really was. But even from such a rough look, he could imagine what a giant thing it had to be.

“That’s the Abyssal Lord—the ‘mother body’ of all demons and the place where demons go after they die,” Dog said from the shadows, his voice carrying a faint, strange emotion. “At the very bottom beneath all the broken islands, His limbs stretch to the ends of the Abyssal Deep. The visible part of His body alone is equal to dozens or even hundreds of city-states. As for the parts you can’t see—the ends of His feelers—those pierce through the ‘bottom’ of the Abyssal Deep and reach into Subspace. They can’t be measured or judged with any language that follows normal math.”

“Every minute and every second, countless demon ‘substrates’ grow in that dark abyss. They are like wisps of smoke, drifting up from the ‘bottom’ on irregular, invisible winds. Through a series of broken spaces, they are sent to the floating islands above. There they devour each other and, in that process, become all kinds of solid beings. Then they fight and kill each other without end. The demons that die turn back into smoke and sludge and, after a short or very long wandering, return to the abyss below to be absorbed by the Holy Lord. It goes on and on, a cycle without end.”

“I have broken free from this cycle… but for the Abyssal Deep as a whole, that change is tiny. The demons’ cycle of devouring will not stop, and the ‘operation’ of the Holy Lord will never end.”

Duncan listened quietly to Dog’s story without saying a word. Only when Dog finished did he give a small nod: “So we just have to go down there?”

“That’s the problem. ‘Going down’ is not easy here,” Dog said, lifting his head out of the shadows to look Duncan in the eye. “Do you remember a very strange and troublesome ‘trait’ of the Abyssal Deep?”

“…You mean that space isn’t continuous here?” Duncan thought for a moment. “I remember we talked about this. In the Abyssal Deep, moving from one place to another is very uncertain. Direction and distance are completely random. But on our way here, we never felt that problem.”

“That’s because we were on an island. Within a single floating island, space still follows the continuous structure we know. But if you leave these islands…”

As Dog spoke, he stepped out of the shadows. He picked up a small stone nearby, took it in his mouth, and flung it far out into the wide darkness beyond the edge of the floating island.

The stone vanished from everyone’s sight in the blink of an eye. As soon as it passed two or three meters beyond the island, it simply disappeared into thin air.

Alice stared wide-eyed at the direction the stone had flown. After several seconds she could not help asking: “Where did the stone go?”

“No idea. There’s only a very small chance it ‘fell downward’,” Dog said, shaking his head. “Up, down, left, right, front, back—any direction, any distance, any landing point is possible. It might be falling from the starry sky right now. It might already have hit some unlucky demon on the head. Or, of course, it might have landed straight on the Abyssal Lord. When a solid object moves in the ‘void’ between floating islands, everything is completely random.”

Duncan frowned: “…So the cycles you just talked about—the demons cycling between the islands and the Holy Lord—are random like this too?”

“Yes,” Dog nodded. “Everything is built on uncertainty. A demon born from the Holy Lord might need hundreds of years before it gains a body on some floating island. A demon corpse killed by its own kind and thrown into the void might ‘fall’ in the dark for a thousand years before it reaches the deepest part of the Abyssal Deep. And that ‘fall’ could be in any direction…”

As he spoke, he lifted his head and looked at the dim starry sky above.

“Given how huge the Abyssal Deep is and how endless the number of demons are, we can even guess that some of the very first demon substrates that split off from the Holy Lord are still drifting in the dark, never having gained a solid body. And among the demons who died in those earliest battles, there may be some still ‘falling’ through that darkness after ten thousand years, never yet reaching the bottom. All of that is entirely possible.”

Uncertainty. Broken space. A “chaotic cycle” system built on countless random events…

How bizarre it all was.

Duncan furrowed his brow, sketching in his mind a world “order” that completely went against common sense based on Dog’s words. After a moment of thought, he said: “…But the Vanished once fell straight through the Abyssal Deep.”

“Yes. And that’s what made it most terrifying,” Dog said. The ghostly green flames in his eye sockets shrank slightly. “In fact, compared to ‘being crushed to death by a ball of fire falling from the sky’, the idea that ‘something can fall from above and is certain to hit the bottom’ shook the demons of the Abyssal Deep even more. Demons have no real minds, but at least they can live in this chaotic place by instinct. The Vanished’s appearance completely broke the ‘rules’ here. That kind of thing—impossible to understand, unreasonable, breaking the laws of this place—is what drove many demons mad on the spot.”

Dog paused, his tone turning very serious: “Do you understand what I mean now? For the Abyssal Deep, the idea that ‘something can fall from above to below, and that this falling always works’—something that is taken for granted in the Mortal Realm—is ‘unspeakable’ here. The Vanished’s fall did more than smash a few islands and kill tens of thousands of demons. It ‘pierced through’ the very order of the Abyssal Deep itself.”

Duncan thought for a moment: “…So you’re saying that, for the demons’ mental and physical health, I’d better not cause any more ‘falls’ here?”

“Not for the demons’ health—their way of living isn’t very healthy anyway,” Dog shook his head. “It’s for the ‘health’ of the Abyssal Deep itself. This place is already unstable. If you smash it one more time, it might really spring a leak.”

Duncan rubbed his chin and stayed silent for a moment.

As he struggled to think about how to solve the problem of discontinuous space outside the floating islands, and how to reach the “bottom” where the Abyssal Lord lay, he suddenly felt someone tugging at his sleeve.

He turned his head and saw Alice’s big, pretty eyes.

The doll raised her hand and held something dark out to him: “Captain! A rock!”

Duncan froze, his expression turning a bit odd: “Uh, Alice, now isn’t the time…”

He suddenly stopped talking.

The rock in Alice’s hand… was the same one Dog had thrown out just now!