Chapter 99

Chapter 99: The First Step of Testing and Control.

After confirming that Alice had no reaction to any of the “key words,” and knew nothing about the ability called “Decapitation,” Duncan decided to tell this muddle-headed cursed doll what he had just learned.

By now he already had a vague guess. Perhaps the key to the anomaly Anomaly 099 – Doll spirit coffin was not Alice the doll herself… but her “spirit coffin.”

The wind and waves on the Boundless Sea were gentle. The cabin swayed softly with the swell. In the flickering light of the oil lamp, the ghost ship’s captain slowly told the past and present of the doll’s spirit coffin—and almost scared the doll into curling up into a ball.

Duncan, expressionless, looked at Alice, who was now sitting in the corner of the bed, back against the wall, clutching her head: “Did you really need to get this nervous?”

“Th-this… this really sounds terrifying!” Alice’s tone had changed. She sounded like an ordinary young lady who had just listened to a ghost story. “All that talk about indiscriminate Decapitation, and about only stopping after everything in range is dead, and about constantly expanding its territory… Th-this… I didn’t know any of that!”

“I do believe now that you really didn’t know,” Duncan glanced at Alice. “But this is indeed the information on Anomaly 099 – Doll spirit coffin.”

Alice held her head, her neck stiff as she looked at Duncan: “Then…”

“So I have two guesses now,” Duncan said. “First, those ‘Decapitation’ incidents might be an ability you activated unconsciously. You yourself are an anomaly, and your power is very likely just a passive area effect. Even in your previous ‘asleep’ state, it would not have stopped the Decapitation effect from occurring.”

As Duncan spoke, he slowly rose from his chair. He walked to the ornate wooden chest and tapped it with the tip of the long sword in his hand.

“Second, the ‘Decapitation’ power of the Doll spirit coffin might not come from you, the doll, but from your ‘spirit coffin’.”

“spirit coffin… you mean my chest?” Alice’s eyes slowly widened. Her gaze followed Duncan’s movement and fell on the wooden chest by the bed. The slow-on-the-uptake doll finally seemed to catch on: “You mean…”

“The full name of Anomaly 099 is ‘Doll spirit coffin’… In other words, you and your chest together make up the complete ‘Anomaly 099.’ When I first saw you, I subconsciously assumed you were the ‘main part’ of it… because I didn’t yet know the full name ‘Doll spirit coffin’,” Duncan rubbed his chin as he thought aloud. “Now that I think it over, the word ‘Doll spirit coffin’ itself… its emphasis seems to be on the latter half.”

Alice blinked. Her mind worked hard for a while, then she clapped her hands: “Oh! I’m the accessory that comes with the chest!”

Duncan gave the empty-headed doll a blank look: “…You don’t have to sound so proud when you say that.”

Alice seemed not to hear the mockery in Duncan’s tone. She only gave her wooden chest a troubled look and spoke in a slightly worried voice: “So that means… my chest has been ‘Decapitating’ people all along? But I’ve lived in it for so long and never felt it was so evil and dangerous… and I’ve never felt it had any special power…”

“Nonsense. You’re part of Anomaly 099 yourself. How could your feelings be any reference?” Duncan frowned. “And feel your own neck. I seriously suspect the reason your head falls off every now and then is because you’ve slept in that chest for too long!”

Alice instantly felt the captain had a point, and her expression became complicated at once. But then she grew confused again: “But if that’s true… if ‘Decapitation’ is an inherent property of my spirit coffin, it has been on the ship for so long. Why haven’t we seen its power activate?”

As soon as she finished speaking, she met Duncan’s quiet gaze. The slow-reacting doll miss suddenly felt a wordless pressure crash down on her head—she had grown lax after living on the ship for a while, and only now suddenly remembered what kind of person this captain was.

Duncan simply gazed at the doll in silence. Only after Alice had curled herself into an even smaller ball did he speak in a low voice: “The only humanoid creature on this ship besides you is me. So what you mean is…”

“I don’t mean anything!” Alice almost jumped up. She waved her hands frantically as she spoke: “Please listen to my excuse—I mean the chest…”

“I never said I was going to do anything to you,” Duncan looked at her helplessly. “You’re now a crew member of the Vanished, and I’m your protector on the Boundless Sea. You really don’t have to be this afraid—can you sit properly? It makes it look like I’m bullying you.”

Only then did Alice let out an “oh” and slowly scoot back to the edge of the bed. But because of her interruption, other thoughts rose in Duncan’s heart. Yes, no matter whether the main body of the Doll spirit coffin was the doll or the spirit coffin, Anomaly 099 had stayed on the Vanished for so long that it had long exceeded the interval for each of its “checks.” Yet this anomaly had always remained harmless… Obviously, it was being suppressed.

Then what was suppressing it—the Vanished, or himself, the “captain”?

Duncan lowered his head and looked at his own hands.

He knew he held rather great power. That power not only allowed him to completely take over the life of a cultist named “Ron,” but was so strong and strange that it made an upper-level anomaly like Alice tremble at first sight, and made “Ah Gou,” a demon of the Abyssal Deep, tuck his tail. He still did not know the essence of this power, but that did not stop him from slowly recognizing how special he was.

On the other hand, the Vanished itself was the fifth-ranked Vision on the Boundless Sea—“Vision,” not anomaly.

That meant that as long as something was within the Vanished’s range, there was a “field” working around the clock, constantly exerting influence on everything inside it.

With both captain and ship suppressing it, Anomaly 099 naturally stayed harmless. But if he really followed his plan and brought Alice to the city-state of Pland… then things could very easily slip out of control.

So he had to figure out a whole series of things—Was the body that produced Anomaly 099’s effects Alice the doll, or this wooden chest? Was it he, the captain, suppressing Anomaly 099, or was it the Vanished? If Alice and the chest were separated, would Anomaly 099’s effect still appear? If it was he, the captain, who created the suppression, what was the range of that suppression?

His thoughts spread further—

If it was the “spirit coffin” that produced the Decapitation effect, would it be safe to bring only Alice herself to Pland? If the spirit coffin was an anomaly component that could be separated out, could his flames also affect it alone? If he used fire to completely dominate this chest, would that be equivalent to controlling the formerly uncontrolled Decapitation effect—just like he used fire to control AI and the brass spirit compass?

A pile of questions lined up in Duncan’s mind, and these questions gradually formed a complex plan for comparative tests. But at the end of that plan, he found one discouraging fact:

He lacked many of the necessary conditions to run those tests.

The Vanished was not a proper testing ground, because the ghost ship’s power would interfere with the accuracy of the results. He also had no suitable test subjects—because Anomaly 099’s Decapitation effect was very costly in terms of lives… it burned through the “testers’” lives.

Duncan lifted his head and looked at Alice, who was sitting obediently at the bedside—the doll miss was gazing at her beloved chest with some sadness, all her tangled feelings practically written on her face.

Perhaps noticing the captain’s gaze, Alice suddenly broke the silence. She spoke softly: “From the day I became conscious… I’ve always lived in this chest. It is my bed, my home, and my Sanctuary World. When I sleep inside it, I feel very safe.”

Duncan did not speak. He only quietly looked at the doll before him.

“Now I know why those humans were so afraid,” Alice reached out and gently stroked her wooden chest. “What they feared was ‘us.’”

“I had originally planned to bring you to the city-state of Pland on my next walk in the Spirit Realm,” Duncan said in a low voice. “I need a helper over there.”

Alice’s eyes seemed to light up, but they dimmed again at once: “Ah, that might not be very good…”

“The plan is postponed, not canceled,” Duncan said, his expression and tone not changing much. “We just need more time to confirm your… ‘your group’s’ power and grasp the conditions under which this ‘Decapitation’ effect takes hold. The human city-states on land can already use various clever methods to seal or even make use of many anomalies. And this is the Vanished. There is even more we can do here.”

Alice gave Duncan a puzzled look. From the captain’s calm, deep gaze, she realized this was not just empty comfort.

“You have a plan?”

Duncan thought for a moment, then raised his fingertip and lit a faint ghostly flame.

“First, we might need a little fire.”