Chapter 743

Chapter 743: Another Core

Vanna left. Even with her divine blessing, she still needed proper rest now.

Duncan watched her leave the captain’s cabin. Only when she disappeared beyond the door did he look away and turn to Goathead, who was sitting quietly at the edge of the chart table: “What do you think of the ‘revelation’ Gamona sent to Vanna?”

“…A large-scale collapse and breakup of the Sun seems to be something the Four Gods knew would happen sooner or later,” Goathead said, after holding himself back for a long time and finally seizing a chance to speak. “I knew they knew about it. They must have been bottling it up for ten thousand years! Back when the Abyssal Lord launched the Genesis Protocol, he talked it over with them as well, but after the Deep Sea era began, every time anyone asked, they all kept their mouths shut and never said what the problem really was. Of course, I can understand them. If they had said it out loud, the people scared to death would have been more than just one or two city-states. Even those popes were kept in the dark. And now look, the Sun is just straight-up starting to fall apart…”

Duncan looked up at him, then reached out and pressed a hand over Goathead’s rambling mouth. “I shouldn’t have asked you.”

With his mouth covered, Goathead let out a string of muffled grunts. His obsidian-carved eyes rolled wildly on his wooden face, his gaze lively for the first time.

Duncan sighed and drew his hand back. “I was asking about the second half of the revelation… ‘They’ want to talk with me. What do you think they plan to talk about? And in what form?”

“…That I don’t know,” Goathead said this time with a rare bit of restraint, shaking his head in annoyance. “Maybe they’re going to coax you into taking over something again?”

Duncan did not answer. He simply sank into thought for a long moment.

The state “they” were in really did not seem good. Before this, Gamona had still been able to pass him a few broken words, but now she could only send down a revelation through Vanna, and it came with that much corruption…

Just then, a voice from far away suddenly broke his thoughts.

His eyes changed slightly. He looked up at the oval mirror hanging on the nearby wall. Under his divine gaze, a layer of phantom flame spread over it. The surface of the mirror turned pitch black, and then light and shadow slowly appeared.

Tyrian’s image appeared in the mirror.

“Father.” The “steel Vice Admiral” looked a little grim. The scene behind him seemed to be somewhere near the Harbor district, and a hazy golden glow soaked everything behind him. It was clearly not a normal sunset. “Sorry to disturb you so suddenly…”

“It’s fine.” Duncan waved a hand, his tone gentle. “What happened to make you so tense?”

“…Our scholar went inside the glowing geometric body that fell at Frostholm. Following the data Lucretia shared earlier, we did find its core. But that thing… isn’t quite the same as in the records. I hope you can see it with your own eyes.”

“Not quite the same?” Duncan frowned slightly. From Tyrian’s reaction, he sensed that things over there were complicated. He nodded at once. “I understand. I’ll be there soon.”

He quickly cut the link with Tyrian, focused his mind, and turned his head—

Outside the graveyard warden’s hut, fine snow fell without a sound. The evening sun sank, and the hazy snowy scene wrapped the whole world in silence.

Inside the warden’s hut, the stove crackled. The samovar whistled sharper and louder as the water came just to a boil and steam rose.

Duncan stood up and closed the stove’s vent a bit, then took the black brimmed hat hanging by the door. He put the hat on, straightened his long black coat, and stepped out of the hut.

Two young guards in black, who were sweeping the paths and checking the lamps in the graveyard, heard the sound and turned their heads at the same time. When they saw the silent warden, always wrapped in bandages and dressed in black from head to toe, walking out of the hut, they straightened at once and saluted.

Duncan waved back at them, then snapped his fingers. A skeletal roc wreathed in ghostly flame crossed a vast distance at once and landed on his shoulder.

“Full tank, let’s go!” Ai flapped her wings and, in her skeletal form, let out a harsh, grating cry. Then she suddenly turned into a violently rising ring of fire. The ring wrapped around Duncan, and the two of them merged into one. In an instant they shot into the sky, streaking toward the Harbor district…

In eastern Frostholm, a vast golden radiance still covered the whole Harbor. The light seemed to have a crystalline texture as it quietly soaked everything within its range. It was bright but not dazzling, gentle yet unsettling.

Aiden, tall and broad-shouldered with a shining bald head, stared nervously at the golden glow around them.

He had taken off the old gear he used to wear as a pirate and now wore the new uniform of Frostholm’s modern navy. In front of his subordinates he always tried to look stern and reliable, but in front of Tyrian he did not hide his unease.

“Are these lights really harmless?” the big bald man muttered. “Looking at them, I feel like I’m being soaked in something. Feels like they’re going to seep into my skin. Even when I breathe, it feels like something is pouring into my lungs…”

Tyrian turned his head and glanced at Aiden.

“First, your lungs already have at least seven holes in them. It’s not like you pour anything good into those holes on a normal day,” he said casually. “Second, we’ve confirmed these lights are harmless. In Lightwind Harbor, Lucretia has been studying this stuff for a long time.”

“…But the thing that fell over here isn’t the same as the one in Lightwind Harbor,” Aiden muttered. “Their ‘core’ is a stone ball…”

This Undying commander, deeply trusted by Tyrian, shook his head. His polished head flashed with a bright golden streak in Tyrian’s view.

Tyrian quietly sidestepped a little. He opened his mouth, about to say something, but then suddenly sensed a presence approaching and shut his mouth, turning his head.

At almost the same moment, a low, slightly hoarse voice reached both his and Aiden’s ears: “You mean the core of this fallen relic isn’t a ‘stone sphere’?”

A pale green flame rose in silence, and Duncan stepped out of the fire. He walked past the startled guards and government staff around them and headed straight toward Tyrian and Aiden.

Aiden jumped in surprise but quickly recovered. He hurried forward two steps and bent down in salute. “Old Captain…”

A bright streak of gold swept across Duncan’s vision. Without changing his expression, he stepped half a pace to the side to get away from the shine of Aiden’s polished head.

“Father,” Tyrian said, reacting as well and stepping forward. “I didn’t expect you to arrive so fast.”

“I’m very curious about the ‘special situation’ you mentioned,” Duncan said, waving his hand as he walked forward. “Let’s not waste time. Tell me on the way—what exactly is going on?”

Tyrian hurried to keep up, speaking quickly as they walked. “It’s hard to describe to you. It’s something we’ve never seen before… even the most learned scholars in the city-state are at a loss. It is a sphere, but its surface is unreal and always shifting, like some kind of living thing. It even makes a faint howling sound… you’ll understand when you see it for yourself.”

Listening to Tyrian’s description, Duncan only nodded lightly and lengthened his stride.

They walked through the pale golden radiance that filled the entire Harbor district, crossed the docks and connecting bridges, and made their way to the shoreline. The way was very quiet. Everyone in the area had been evacuated in a hurry, and long lines of barricades cut the whole dock district off from the city. The center of the glowing orb’s glow lay right at one corner of this Harbor’s coastline.

If someone looked down from the sky at that moment, they would see the irregular glowing geometric body covering almost one third of the city-state. It was as if a glowing structure had suddenly “grown” from the edge of Frostholm Island and was lighting up a vast area of sea around it in the dusk.

Led by Tyrian and Aiden, Duncan finally reached the center of the glowing geometric body and saw the “core structure” that had left Frostholm’s scholars puzzled and even a little afraid.

It floated at the end of the beach, with calm seawater a dozen meters away. A sphere about ten meters across hung quietly there. Rough scaffolding already stood around its edges, and workers bustled nearby.

“See, that’s it…” Tyrian raised his hand and pointed at the huge sphere. Its surface flowed with color and moved like a living thing, giving off a sense of unease. “This thing doesn’t look like stone at all.”

“…Of course it isn’t stone…”

Duncan looked up, eyes half narrowed. After a brief moment of surprise, a strange feeling, both natural and hard to name, rose in his heart. He watched the “core,” his lips moving a few times before he softly answered Tyrian’s question.

“This is a gaseous planet.”

Tyrian froze for a moment, then repeated the unfamiliar term in confusion: “A gaseous planet? What does that mean?”

Duncan did not answer. After watching it for a moment, he slowly walked two steps forward until he stood right under the floating “gaseous planet,” quietly studying the structure of its surface.

Bands of brilliant clouds with a faint metallic sheen flowed slowly across its surface, drawing ring after ring of “cloud streams” around the whole body. Tiny vortices and storms spun between the cloud bands, slow and magnificent.

When he moved closer, he heard the “howling” Tyrian had mentioned. It was very faint, as if coming from a distant age.

The sound came from within the celestial body. Long, long ago, in the era before everything was wiped out, that howling might have been deafening and strong enough to tear apart a small celestial body. Back then, this planet had been vast and overwhelming, big enough to hold tens of thousands of Boundless Seas within its clouds.

But now, this “star” only ten meters across could give off only that faint, barely audible sound… like a sob.