Chapter 3: Lost on the Frontier

Chapter 3: Lost on the Border
The hard, pitch-black face of the wooden goat-head gazed at Duncan, who sat behind the sailing table, and an eerie light seemed to flow from his obsidian eyes – in fact, the thing had no ability to produce expressions at all, but Duncan could clearly read a certain sense of anticipation in the other man’s wooden face.

In fact, this wasn’t the first time the goathead had urged him to “set sail”; it did so every time he came here.

He even felt that the ship was constantly urging him to end this blind sea drift as soon as possible, and set sail back to the right path as soon as possible.

Yet Duncan fell silent, clouds of gloom spreading over his now naturally imposing countenance, and in his contemplation and reticence he realized two things clearly:
First, he was alone on this entire ship, which was insanely large – as a sail-powered vessel, the full length of the Lost Country, as Duncan roughly estimated it, was at least 150 to 200 meters – and it would be difficult to maneuver such a massive ship. As a sail-powered ship, the “Lost Country” was at least 150 to 200 meters long, and Duncan roughly estimated that it would take dozens or even hundreds of experienced sailors to maneuver such a huge thing.

Secondly, after removing the professional factors mentioned above, there was another key problem that hindered his sailing journey – he did not know how to drive a boat.

Duncan was a bit anxious, he tried to hypothesize what would happen if he asked the weird and noisy goathead in front of him to teach him how to pilot a ship, and got even more anxious after hypothesizing.

Goathead, however, had no idea what his captain was thinking, it simply asked, “Captain, do you have any concerns? If you are worried about the situation of the Lost Country ship, then you can rest assured that the Lost Country ship is always ready to sail with you to the end of the world, or are you worried that today’s sailing is unlucky? I know a little about divination. What kind of divination do you believe in? Celestial signs, incense, crystals whatever, and speaking of crystals, do you remember ……”

Duncan struggled to tense the muscles in his face, and spoke in a hushed voice while restraining the urge to fight the goat-head in front of him, “I’ll go on deck first and observe the situation – you stay here in peace.”

“At your service – but I must remind you that the Lost Country has been drifting blindly for far too long, and you must take charge of it as soon as possible to get this voyage back on track ……”

The goat’s head said, followed by the sound of wood scraping as it finally regained the stance it had at the start.

Duncan instantly felt the whole world subside.

He breathed a soft sigh of relief as the resonance in his brain calmed down, then picked up the flintlock rifle that was sitting on the table and got up to walk out of the captain’s cabin.

The flintlock, which looked quite old, was one he had found while exploring the ship, along with a one-handed sword, which was currently slung around his waist, and those two items were what made him feel safe and secure as he moved about the ship.

It had taken him a long time to learn roughly what to do with both during the last few days of exploration – even though so far he hadn’t seen any living thing other than himself on this ship.

Talking “objects” didn’t count.

The salty sea air calmed Duncan’s slightly agitated mind as he stepped out onto the deck outside the captain’s cabin and subconsciously looked up at the sky.

Thick overcast clouds still covered the sky as far as the eye could see, no sun, moon or stars could be seen in the clouds, only the muddy light of the sky shrouded the boundless sea.

Such a sight had been going on for a long time, in fact since the day Duncan had arrived on this ship he had only ever seen skies like this – it even made him wonder if normal weather didn’t exist in this world at all, and if this cloudy scene was the eternal sky over these waters?

Duncan turned, and he saw the door to the captain’s cabin standing still, a line of words carved into the beam above it in some sort of alphabet he didn’t recognize, and as his eyes coalesced on that line, its meaning came directly and clearly into his mind:
“The Gate of the Lost Countrymen.”

“The Gate of the Lost Ones …… The Lost Ones?” muttered Duncan to himself, then laughed a little to himself, “That’s a good name for a ship.”

He then stepped around the captain’s cabin and down the stairs at the edge of the deck to the upper deck at the stern, where there was a wooden platform where the most open view of the entire ship, aside from the lookout, was.

A heavy black steering wheel waited silently on the platform for the helmsman to arrive. Duncan frowned, for some reason he suddenly felt a sense of urgency and anxiety that seemed to have arisen out of nowhere the moment he saw the wheel.

It was a feeling that had not arisen the few times he had been here before!
As if in response to this anxiety in his heart, an unexplained and chaotic wind suddenly blew across the deck, and the originally calm sea surface around him instantly rose up, although this wind and waves are not so large as to have any effect on the huge “Lost Country”, but Duncan’s heart alarm bells ringing, the next second, he was driven by intuition to look towards the direction of the bow. The next moment, he was driven by intuition to look in the direction of the bow of the ship.

In the sea directly in front of the Lost Country ship, in that piece of chaotic haze between the sky and the sea, an infinite, as if through the sky wall of white fog high wall seems to appear out of thin air, so that he instantly stared at the eyes!
That was the white mist that seemed to surround and isolate the entire world, connecting heaven and earth like a 10,000-foot wall crushing over, and what made Duncan (Zhou Ming) even more wary than its palpitating scale was that the thing instantly reminded him of the boundless mist outside the window of his bachelor apartment!
The Lost Country was heading straight for that wall of fog!

Duncan didn’t know what that fog was or what was in its depths, but he instinctively felt great danger, and his survival instincts told him that being engulfed by that fog was never a good thing!

He subconsciously rushed to the platform where the rudder was located – and a great sense of powerlessness enveloped him at the same time: even if he took the helm, how was he supposed to steer this huge ship away from that wall of fog by himself?
But he still instinctively came to the wheel, and almost at the same time, he heard a hoarse and gloomy voice coming from a copper pipe next to the wheel, connected to the captain’s cabin, the voice of the “goat-head” – the tone of that weird thing was a bit panicky this time. Panic:
“Sir Captain, there is a border collapse ahead, and we are approaching the limits of reality! Please adjust course immediately!”

Listening to the goathead’s panicked voice, Duncan almost cursed – adjusting course is easy to say, why don’t you just turn out a hundred or eighty good brothers on the spot who know how to steer a boat to get this thing going?
Immediately after he looked up again in the direction of the masts in front of him, and saw a few bare masts standing on the deck, and the pathos in his heart increased – not to mention raising the sails, in fact, this ship has no sails at all, and those poles are all empty!

Under the emotional excitement, he did not even care to seriously think about the goat head just popped up in a sentence of those strange words, only instinct let him subconsciously grabbed in front of the steering wheel that somehow seems to be slightly trembling.

In the past few days, this was the first time he took the initiative to put his hand on the steering wheel of the Lost Country ship – before the strange situation on this ship and the goat head’s repeated urging had always made him doubtful, and he was full of resistance to the matter of “taking the helm”, but now, he finally had no hesitation! Now, he finally had no chance to hesitate.

He gripped the rudder tightly, and his blank mind didn’t even have time to think about how to take charge of an empty and unoccupied ghost ship with just one person.

The change came in the next instant.

A sound like a mountain of voices boomed in Duncan’s head, as if ten thousand cheering men were standing on the shore to see a ship off, as if a thousand hooting sailors were shouting the captain’s name from the deck, and as if interspersed with a bleak ship’s song and an invisible thrumming wave.

A green flame emerged at the edge of his vision, and Duncan subconsciously looked into his palm, where he saw a turquoise fire suddenly erupt from the Lost Country’s steering wheel, and sweep over with astonishing swiftness, spreading all over his body in the blink of an eye.

In the fierce flames, flesh and blood suddenly became hollow and illusory, the captain’s uniform became tattered and ragged as if it had been immersed in seawater for dozens of centuries, and underneath the flesh and blood that suddenly became as illusory as a spirit body, Duncan could even vaguely see his own skeleton – the crystalline jade-like skeleton jumping with flames, the unquenchable fire! coursing through his body like water.

Yet he couldn’t feel the slightest pain or burning heat, and in the roaring flames, he only felt his senses spreading in all directions.

The fire swept down from the bridge, spread over the deck, over the side of the ship, over the masts, the flames intertwined like a web, and rose up from the deck like a breath, spreading all the way along the lone mast, and finally intertwining between the sea and the fog to form a huge sail like a veil of mist.

The Lost Country set sail, in front of the rapidly collapsing borders of reality.

(Mom yeah, surprise!

PS: There’s a new fully booked extra on the Sword of Dawn side, which should theoretically be the last extra chapter, so you can check it out~~~)

(End of this chapter)