Chapter 8

Chapter 8: the Sun

A doll. A doll so delicate and lifelike that Duncan almost failed to tell it was not a real person at first glance. She lay quietly inside the ornate wooden chest, like a lady sleeping in a spirit coffin, waiting for someone to wake her.

Duncan really felt she would open her eyes in the next second.

But it was only an illusion. The doll just lay there in the chest, not reacting to anything around her.

Duncan watched this strange… “thing” with wary care. A doll by itself was nothing unusual, but her face looked too close to a real human, and that coffin-like wooden box gave him a gut feeling of danger. When he thought about how this chest had appeared on the Vanished for no reason at all, it was no wonder he became so alert.

After watching for a long time, Duncan finally felt sure that the gorgeous Brother doll in the chest was not going to suddenly jump up and give him a fright. Only then did he relax a little. He frowned and asked Goathead: “What do you think is going on here?”

“This should be the important cargo that ship was escorting earlier,” Goathead answered at once. Before, it had said it did not recognize the strange wooden chest that had suddenly appeared on deck, but its experience with matters at sea was clearly richer than that of Duncan, this fake captain. “There are symbols on the outside of the chest that point to a God, and there are bolts around it for fastening chains. That may mean it used to be under some kind of seal. Carrying a sealed object across the Boundless Sea is extremely risky. That ship must have had some backing.”

“A seal?” Duncan’s eyelids twitched. He looked at the chest lid, which he had already pushed fully open. When it arrived on the Vanished, the lid had already been broken, which was why he had been able to move it so easily. He did not understand much about seals and that sort of thing, but he was sure whatever seal this thing once had was now gone. “So this thing is dangerous?”

“It is very dangerous to those fragile ordinary people, but I do not think it can threaten you,” Goathead said. “An Anomaly that can be sealed by human skill is not something that could resist Captain Duncan’s power.”

Duncan stayed silent, his face serious, but his thoughts churned.

Goathead’s flattery sounded nice enough. If he really had been this “Captain Duncan”, he might even have believed it. But he was not, so inside he was panicking.

Because Goathead’s words had made it clear that the doll lying in that coffin was a “dangerous item”! It was only harmless to the real captain!

Even though he now carried Captain Duncan’s name, and even seemed to be using the man’s body and some of his power, Zhou Ming had a clear idea of his own limits. He did not believe this alone made him the same as the “real Captain Duncan”.

He still knew far too little about this world, this ship, and even the body he now used.

On top of that, he had sharply noticed a new strange word in Goathead’s speech just now—“Anomaly”.

Anything out of the ordinary could be called an anomaly. It sounded like an ordinary word, but the way Goathead had stressed it made him faintly sense that, here, this word had some special meaning.

Maybe in this world, the word “Anomaly” did not just mean something “unusual”. It also pointed to a certain category of things. For example… a doll lying in a coffin.

Sadly, he had no good excuse to ask about something that probably counted as “common knowledge” here.

He sighed inwardly, feeling again how he needed to collect information and build up knowledge very carefully. Then Duncan frowned and gave the doll one last look, as if making up his mind at last: “I should throw it back into the sea.”

He felt a trace of hesitation as he spoke. When he looked at the doll, that hesitation grew stronger.

It was not just because “the doll was pretty”, something that simple. It was because “she” really did look too much like a living person sleeping in a spirit coffin. When he thought of throwing her back into the sea, Duncan even felt as if he was tossing a living human off the ship.

But in the end, that very hesitation only hardened his resolve.

He already knew this world held many strange and eerie things. So far, all he had seen of it was this one ship, the Vanished, but even here he had already met the talking Goathead, a mast that could raise its own sails, lamps that never went out, that weird and dangerous sea, the chilling Spirit Realm, and endless sea fog…

Just now, he had even run into a mechanical ship sailing this eerie sea while carrying a sealed object. The thing that ship had been “guarding” had then somehow appeared on the deck of the Vanished.

As a rational and cautious person, he could not keep something so likely to hold strange, dangerous power just because the doll looked pretty.

Regret was regret, but Duncan still firmly closed the “coffin’s” lid again. Because he still did not feel at ease, he went into the cabin to find nails and a hammer, and carefully hammered a ring of iron nails all around the lid.

At last, he pushed the “spirit coffin” holding the doll to the edge of the deck.

Goathead’s voice sounded in his ears: “You may deal with your spoils as you wish, but I still humbly offer a suggestion. There is no need to be so careful. The Vanished has not added to its spoils in a long time…”

“Shut up.” Duncan cut off Goathead’s rambling with that simple reply.

Goathead fell silent. Duncan then kicked hard at the “spirit coffin” and sent it straight into the sea.

The heavy chest dropped straight down from the rail and plunged into the sea, which had already gone back to its normal color. After a dull splash, it floated back up and slowly drifted toward the stern of the Vanished.

Duncan watched the chest with his gaze as it drifted away on the waves. Only after it was completely hidden behind the stern did he finally let out a slow breath. Then he lifted his head and looked into the distance. The mist over the sea had completely cleared, and the blue ocean rose and fell gently around the Vanished.

The ship had fully left the Spirit Realm and returned to the Mortal Realm.

There was no sign at all on the nearby sea of the mechanical ship that had briefly crossed paths with the Vanished.

Duncan frowned slightly and did a quick estimate of how much time had passed since the ships met and how fast each one should be sailing.

From the way the sea now looked, that ship should not have vanished from sight so quickly.

“…Was this also because of this strange sea? Or was it tied to that so-called ‘Spirit Realm sailing’?” he wondered.

Duncan muttered to himself in his heart, but soon his attention was caught by something else—

He saw a line of golden light suddenly appear deep within the heavy clouds that had always hung over the sea.

Bright golden sunlight slowly spread out. The thick clouds, like heavy curtains, seemed to be brushed aside by an invisible hand and began to thin and melt away. The sea, which had been gloomy for who knew how long, was slowly lit by sunlight. Duncan stood at the bow of the Vanished, eyes wide, using his gaze to take in the sight of the clouds breaking up. In that moment, he suddenly felt a strange, hard-to-name emotion.

Ever since he had learned, days ago, that “this side” existed, ever since he had first explored this strange ship, those unbroken clouds had always covered the whole sea. He had almost come to believe this world simply had no sunlight at all, that it was meant to be forever overcast.

He had been parted from sunlight for too long. Even on the other side of the “door”, in Zhou Ming’s small studio apartment, the thick fog outside the window had long since hidden the Sun.

But now, the Boundless Sea had cleared.

After being away from sunlight for so long, he finally had the feeling of seeing the sky again in this world “on this side”.

Duncan took a deep breath without thinking and spread his arms toward the direction of the sunlight. The heavy clouds seemed to answer him, quickly thinning and fading away. At the brightest instant of the sky, a huge sphere covered in countless twisted streams of golden light came into Duncan’s view.

Duncan’s expression froze in that very moment, arms still spread to welcome the sunlight.

He stared at the sky, eyes wide. The sunlight was bright, but not as blinding as what he was used to. He could clearly see the thing hanging above. He saw the shell of the sphere, covered in countless tight, tangled lines. He saw the brilliant streams of light spilling out around it. And against the crossing glow, he saw two ring-shaped structures around the central sphere, laid out like concentric circles and slowly turning.

Duncan narrowed his eyes. He could just make out that the two rings seemed to be made up of countless fine and complex runes linked together, as if some supreme power had carved an eternal shackle into the sky, chaining “the Sun” in place.

Duncan did not get to embrace the sunlight he had longed for.

This world did not have sunlight at all.

“What is that?” he asked softly, his voice low and cold.

“That is, of course, the Sun, Captain,” Goathead said, as calm as always.