Chapter 749

Chapter 749. Walking Against the Light

The captain had already arrived.

Almost the moment the uninvited guest in the white robe finished speaking, a column of swirling green flame rose in the room, and a figure stepped out of the fire.

Shirley jumped up the instant she saw Duncan: “Captain, Captain! A Ender suddenly showed up over here just now! This one seems to be the not-crazy kind, and he says he wants to talk to you…”

“I know,” Duncan raised a hand to cut off Shirley’s excited shouting, his gaze already fixed on the uninvited guest. “I was wondering how long you would wait before you appeared in front of me—didn’t expect it to be this soon.”

“You knew I would come?” the old man in the white robe asked casually. Though his words showed doubt and surprise, his face stayed very calm.

“You were bound to come sooner or later, because ‘dusk’ has already begun. Any member of the End Survey Group who still has a clear mind at this moment should be very willing to meet me, and I also very much want to talk with you,” Duncan said as he let his gaze sweep around the room. “…This isn’t a good place to talk. We can move somewhere else to speak.”

As soon as he finished, Shirley, Dog, and Morris—who was in the middle of casting all kinds of blessings on himself—started nodding hard in agreement…

The uninvited guest seemed not to notice their reaction. He only looked at Duncan: “That’s fine. Let’s go somewhere closer to Subspace. I’ll feel a bit more comfortable there.”

Closer to Subspace? Duncan frowned slightly at those words, but after a brief silence he still nodded slowly: “Alright.”

When Morris heard this, his eyes widened a little without thinking: “Captain, are you sure you want to bring—”

“It’s fine,” Duncan waved his hand. “I know what I’m doing. Shirley, go to the captain’s cabin and bring me that brass consecrated lantern.”

Before long, Duncan was holding the brass consecrated lantern and walking quietly with the uninvited guest in the worn white robe through the lower decks of the Vanished. They had already passed the cargo hold of light Inversion and were now on the last corridor; the stairs leading to the bottom of the hold stood at its far end.

The brass consecrated lantern shed a dim green flame, and its light drove back the gloom around them. In the empty corridor at the bottom of the ship, only the echo of footsteps could be heard in most moments—two sets of them. But sometimes Duncan noticed that only his own footsteps were sounding. The Ender beside him seemed not fully in the current Mortal Realm. At times he was like a weightless spirit form, walking on the old wooden boards without making any sound. At other times, even his presence seemed close to fading, as if he had suddenly gone somewhere very far away…

It was very strange, but Duncan stayed polite and did not ask.

Only when they neared the last door did the Ender finally break the silence: “You actually do not need this lantern—this lantern was prepared for a mortal.”

Duncan’s steps paused for a moment. He was quiet, then walked on: “But this ship needs it.”

“…You are truly full of goodwill,” the Ender said softly, and his tone seemed sincerely admiring.

“If you had asked me not long ago, I never would have imagined that one day I would bring a Ender here—and in such a calm mood,” Duncan said casually. “Our first contact with your people was not pleasant.”

“Is it possible that I was also among those who first made contact with you?” The white-robed Ender showed a faint, hard-to-read smile. “At least, I was one of them.”

Duncan turned his head and studied the man’s face carefully in the lantern light.

He saw an old traveler in a white robe, his back bent. The lines on his face looked carved by time itself. His sunken eyes held a faint, metallic gold sheen. His bearing was calm, his smile mild, and only the years seemed to flow quietly in the depths of his gaze.

Duncan drew back his gaze and turned his head forward again as he continued walking: “I don’t know. I don’t remember this face of yours. In any case, whether you were among the ones I dragged onto the ship back then doesn’t matter. What matters is that right now, here you are, talking to me.”

“It seems you already understand us very well.”

Duncan neither agreed nor denied it. He had already reached the last door and was reaching for the handle.

“We’re here. This is the place on the ship closest to Subspace.”

As he spoke, he pushed the dark wooden door open in one motion, and the structure of the lowest hold came into view.

Ever-burning lamp light lit the cabin. The once shattered structure of the lower hold had been repaired in the Lightwind Harbor incident and was now whole again. The solid hull that had grown from the Elder Gods’ spine closed in on all sides, blocking the chaotic light flows and murmurs projecting in from Subspace. That eerie wooden door that led straight into Subspace still stood in the depths of the hold, its panels tightly shut, silent and unmoving.

Duncan led his “guest” into the cabin. The Ender followed right behind him, then lifted his head to look over the walls and ceiling and let out a sigh: “Ah… you have already repaired this place…”

“You know quite a lot,” Duncan said as he casually hung the consecrated lantern on a nearby pillar and glanced back. “Did some of your people come here in a timeline I don’t know about?”

“I once saw its wreckage—maybe in the past, maybe in the future,” the old man in the white robe said, as if recalling something, his brow slightly furrowed. “…It broke apart in flame and fell into darkness. The real and grand sight of it was gripping.”

Duncan did not answer that topic. He had been thinking about many things along the way. Now he took a moment to put his words in order before asking: “How many members of the End Survey Group are still sane like you?”

Then he paused and added: “I mean in the current time node.”

The old man in the white robe was silent for a while, his face still calm: “Only me.”

Duncan felt as if his breath and heartbeat both stopped for half a beat.

Then he heard the voice of the old man in white again: “Captain, do you know what it feels like to grope around in the dark?”

This last Critt who still held on to clarity and reason spoke calmly, slowly spreading his hands as if that eternal darkness still lay before his eyes—

“‘End Survey Group’… it has really been a long time since I last heard that name. In the first instant after we set out, that name already turned to dust in history.

“The ‘time’ of this world is limited. This was something we knew from the very beginning. The whole Boundless Sea, the whole Deep Sea era, was like a delicate clock whose running time had been set in advance. We knew it could only tick for a certain stretch, and our only hope was to find a chance to ‘wind it up’ again before the hands stopped…

“That wise follower of yours is already close to building the whole shape of the ‘world’. He was the first to add ‘time’ as an axis into the World Model. In our eyes, this axis looks even more… real, hard, and cold.

“Our task was to move along the time axis and, at every fork that could create a history branch, to observe and give mental guidance, doing everything possible to extend the life of the Sanctuary World while looking for a way to keep going beyond the End of Time.

“From our own experience, this process felt a bit like… walking against the light.

“The day Vision 001 was first lit in the test field was the starting point of that light. It was the most stable moment of the whole Sanctuary World. Everything had just been born, resources were abundant, the timelines were firm, and everything looked so good it seemed as if it could last forever. We set out from that bright morning of sunlight and left the light behind us, walking all the way toward the darkness at the end.

“As we moved away from the ‘starting point’, we saw the world slowly decline. All the small, unavoidable hidden flaws left from the beginning of creation gradually grew and turned into all kinds of deadly threats. The light faded, and the darkness grew. We turned our backs to the sunlight and walked toward the veil of night; the farther we went, the darker it became. We did everything we could to make adjustments, watching the possibilities along the time axis in the dimming glow, hoping to delay the coming of the dark… In a way, we succeeded.

“This Sanctuary World’s original ‘design lifespan’ was eight thousand years. By avoiding waste, easing chaos, and lowering the load on the Sun, it has already run two thousand years past that.

“But before the endless river of time, our success is tiny and doomed to be worn away completely.

“At the end of the time axis there is always only darkness. No matter how we tried to carry the light from the ‘starting point’ as far as we could into the future, or to pick up stray sparks along this road that kept getting darker, we could not light up that time end that loomed like a boundless black wall… We slammed into that endless dark, groped around, and came back with nothing. Then we recalibrated the whole time axis, checked every possibility again, did everything we could to push the future further forward, and then crashed into the dark again, over and over… countless times.”

The old man in the white robe lifted his head and cast a gaze toward some dark corner in the dim cabin. After quite a while, he went on: “There is no road ahead—that was the last sentence left by the first of us to lose his mind before he left. As a forward squad member, he stayed at the time end longer than any of us. He went through every possibility and in the end chose to give up, and even chose… to go back to the past, to ‘correct’ those wasted days.

“That was the first ‘Ender’ the world spoke of… He only entered a runaway state not long ago, and it has been so long since I last saw him that I can no longer remember his name.”

Duncan listened in silence. After a long time, he finally said: “And you held on to your sanity until the very end and have come to stand in front of me still clear-headed.”

“Yes,” the old man in the white robe turned his head, his eyes falling on Duncan. “Because in the current time node, I entered your field of view—when the order of the world is on the verge of collapse, the cause can come after the effect.”