Chapter 728

Chapter 728: Navigation

Duncan was very confident in his memory. He happened to remember exactly what the stone Dog had just thrown looked like, and now he was sure the stone in Alice’s hand was that very same one.

Dog quickly realized something was wrong too. It stared in shock at the stone in the doll’s hand and said: “…What are the odds? It fell right into your hand?!”

“No,” Alice shook her head at once, looking as if this were only natural, “I picked it up and brought it back.”

“You… picked it up?” Shirley’s face instantly looked like she had just seen a ghost. She stared straight at the doll and asked: “How did you pick it up? According to what Dog just said, shouldn’t this thing have ended up in some random place in the Abyssal Deep?”

Alice fell into thought at once, as if she was trying to figure out how to explain a process she herself could not really put into words. She waved her hands while she spoke: “Just now, when we were talking about where things that fall from here might end up, I got curious about where that stone went. Then I found it. Then I just picked it up… that’s all…”

As Alice spoke, she casually made a motion of plucking something out of the air, as if this were completely normal. But her explanation did not just confuse Shirley; even Dog felt lost listening to it.

Duncan, standing to the side, suddenly frowned. Something came to him in a flash.

When they crossed that frozen, ancient starry sky, Alice’s strange behavior… LH-03, the Navigation Mainframe.

His expression changed slightly. He bent down at once to pick up another small stone from nearby. After letting Alice see it clearly, he threw it hard out into the boundless darkness beyond the floating island.

Just like before, once the stone flew a few meters beyond the island’s edge, it vanished from everyone’s sight in an instant.

Duncan turned back and looked into Alice’s eyes: “Do you know where it went? Can you pick it up again?”

He had barely finished speaking when Alice already raised her hand and held out a small, pitch-black stone, her face bright with the look of someone asking for praise: “Here, the stone!”

Even though he already had a guess in his heart, Duncan still could not help going blank for a few seconds when he saw the doll bring the stone out again so simply and casually. No one had seen how Alice “picked” it back up. Even he had not seen it.

It was as if the whole process had been skipped. “Addressing,” “route,” and “arrival” had all been compressed into some unobservable crack in time, leaving only the “result” as output.

Shirley finally could not hold back her favorite filler word: “…Holy crap, this is just way too absurd…”

Dog seemed to notice something from the change in the captain’s expression. It turned its skull and asked, puzzled: “Do you know how she did that?”

Duncan’s face grew a bit more serious. After a brief hesitation, he nodded lightly: “…Alice has another identity. It might be called ‘LH-03’.”

Dog froze. This time it spoke in unison with Shirley: “…Holy crap, this is way too absurd…”

“We can talk about this later. Maybe once we meet the Abyssal Lord we can get more answers.” Duncan waved his hand and did not continue on that topic. Instead, he turned his gaze to Alice. “Do you have a way to take us to the ‘bottom’?”

Alice tilted her head. Then she held one hand to her temple and carefully walked to the broken edge of the land. She leaned out to look down at the endless darkness below and the little points of “starlight” faintly twinkling in that darkness, as if she were working hard to observe and think.

After a long time, she finally stepped back two steps and pointed into the vast darkness beyond the floating island: “Here, there are countless lines and ‘paths’. Some of them connect to ‘down below’. I think we can follow them down… but I don’t know how to take you with me.”

Just as she finished speaking, Duncan took a step forward: “Let me take a look.”

As he spoke, Duncan put his hand on Alice’s shoulder. At the same time, a flicker of phantom-like ghost?green flame rose in Alice’s eyes.

A vast, complex, almost frightening structure appeared in Duncan’s sight.

He saw the world through the doll’s eyes—at least, part of that world.

He saw endless fine strands, like drifting hairs, growing from the bottom of the Abyssal Deep and stretching upward until they connected to the frozen, ancient starry sky above. He saw countless lines crisscrossing within that starry sky. Some merged downward. Some seemed to vanish into the depths of the sky as if into thin air.

He also saw faint, tube?like structures filling the darkness beyond the floating island. They crossed, broke, and shifted without pause, like some runaway network of “paths”. Just one glance made him dizzy. There was no pattern he could grasp, much less any way to see the whole.

Duncan frowned. He really did see that massive web of lines and paths, but all he could do was “see” it. He could not spot any pattern in it, and there was no way he could find the starting point and end point of any single path in such a short time. To him, this tangle in the Abyssal Deep was like some “encrypted data block”, pure gibberish.

Yet through the link created by the flame, he could dimly sense Alice’s state in that moment—she did not feel there was anything chaotic about the massive information in her vision at all.

Everything in her eyes was neat and ordered. The jumbled paths in that starry sky and the network of lines in the dark could have driven all the scholars in the world mad, but for her… it seemed that in any given instant, she could calculate the start and end of any single path.

In fact, right then and there, she was still calculating without pause. A huge computation, one she herself could not sense, was booming away in the depths of her mind every second without stopping.

Duncan blinked. Against the background of the countless lines that filled the whole Abyssal Deep, he seemed to see Alice suddenly turn her head. She smiled softly. Her lips did not move, yet a voice went straight into his ears:

“Welcome to the navigation database of the New Hope. It stores billions of gravitational signatures and calibration parameters between the stars, and can simulate in real time the relative motions of any celestial bodies in deep space, in order to calibrate the Star Map… We will cro&?ss the stars, and at the e&?nd of light?speed reach our new home ()*&*??%… We will sur%#vive, and rebu*&ild the old )*world… ~*&”

Like a kind female system voice, the broadcast gradually picked up static. Delay and distortion blurred the tone more and more, and then, in an unnoticeable instant, it cut off.

Alice was still carefully studying the dark space beyond the floating island. She clearly had not turned around, and she had not spoken.

Duncan raised his hand and dispelled the ghost?green flame linking him to Alice.

The dizzying lines and tube?like paths vanished from his sight at once.

Alice turned around and smiled happily: “You saw it all, right, Captain? I wasn’t wrong, was I?”

“I saw it. But I’m afraid only you can handle the ‘navigation’ from here.” Duncan took a light breath and looked seriously at the doll. “You take us down.”

Alice froze for a moment, then hurried to speak: “But I don’t know how to bring other people…”

“It’s all right. I know. We’ll follow you. You only need to trust your own judgment and walk forward without hesitation. Can you do that?”

Faced with the captain’s unusually serious expression, Alice could not help feeling a little nervous. But at last she still nodded, and her face became serious too: “Mm, I can!”

Duncan nodded slightly, then stepped back half a step and spread his arms.

A column of ghost?green flame shot up into the air, spiraled upward, then began to spread out around him as its center. After that, it flowed toward Shirley, Dog, and Alice.

He recalled his experience when he had once “fused” with AI, then reminded them softly in his heart: “Shirley, relax a little. Don’t be afraid.”

“I… I’m not afraid!” Shirley’s voice came at once from beside him. “Dog is the one who’s scared!”

All the bones in Dog’s body shook as if someone had turned on a vibration setting. It trembled while still trying to sound tough: “D?d?don’t talk nonsense. I?I’m relaxed. The captain, he… he knows!”

Duncan shook his head with a smile. In the rising flames, he turned his gaze to the doll in front of him: “Alice, let’s go.”

Alice nodded, then turned around without hesitation and walked toward the boundless void beyond the floating island.

A mass of roaring ghost?green flame disappeared into the darkness that rushed up to meet it.

At the same time, deep within the Sacred Isle in the Mortal Realm, Lucretia and Morris, who were keeping wary watch over that black door, both heard a strange, low rumble.

The sound seemed to come from deep behind the door. It pierced the surface of the “door panels”, which rose and fell slowly like liquid mercury yet were as black as mud, and echoed again and again through the cave.

In that brief daze, Morris felt as if he heard a string of blurry words. He could only make out a few of them: “LH-03… reconnect…”

“Did you hear someone talking?” The old scholar snapped out of his trance at once and turned his head toward the “Sea Witch” beside him.

“No,” Lucretia answered at once, while staring hard at the surface of the black door that was constantly rippling and writhing. “But I feel like… something is about to come out of there.”

Almost at the same moment, Morris also felt those auras full of malice and madness. Some chaotic, frenzied presence seemed to have finally discovered this crack leading to the Mortal Realm and had started to gather toward it.

Morris had to push down his questions for now. Right after that, he saw something take shape in the writhing darkness of the door—a twisted, grotesque Abyssal demon that struggled and squeezed its way out of the gate and stepped into the Mortal Realm.

Lucretia instantly raised the Conductor’s Baton in her hand and turned it into a black scythe gleaming with cold light. Morris, however, suddenly froze when he saw the demon’s form.

It was the first time he had seen a demon invading the Mortal Realm look like this.

After a moment of stunned silence, he and Lucretia looked at each other.

“…Why does this Death?Omen Bird only have one leg?”

“No idea… kill it first, talk later.”

“Fair enough.”