Chapter 43: Good morning, Mr. Duncan.

Chapter 43 Good Morning, Mr. Duncan
Duncan put the book back, and checked the furnishings in the rest of the house, and didn’t find anything of value – there was so little in the small bedroom, and it didn’t seem to be used very often, that the most valuable clues were the book, and the two old notebooks sitting in the desk drawer.

The notebooks were filled with writing relating to steam organs and engineering principles, interspersed with a few occasional complaints about certain teachers or certain classmates.

It was easy to tell that the occupant was a young man of school age.

Duncan slowly combed through the fragments of memory in his mind and returned to the master bedroom after restoring everything in the room to its original state.

After sitting on the edge of the bed for a moment in thought, he got up again and went to the nearby standing cabinet, pulling the door open and opening one of the drawers, almost following the memory in his muscles.

A few bottles of spirits lay tucked away in the depths of the drawer, as well as half a box of pain-relieving, nerve-soothing pills, left behind by the cultist known as “Ron”.

He had a serious illness that had worsened to the point of being incurable, and poor quality spirits and temporary painkillers were always in the drawer, but they did nothing to prolong the life of a sick man.

So the man, who had lost hope in life, turned to the Cult of the Sun, whose missionaries told him that the healing power of the Sun God could solve all the world’s ills and purify the minds and bodies of those who converted, and to a certain extent, those who converted did fulfill their promises:

They have a bloody and bizarre ritual, using blood as a medium to channel the vitality of innocent people into the sick believers. Duncan does not know what the principle of this ritual is, nor does he know if it can really cure incurable diseases, but according to the memory fragments remaining, the cultist named “Ron” did get better after the ritual, and further died of the disease. After the ceremony, the cultist named “Ron” did get better, and became a believer in the sun, and even donated half of his family’s wealth to the “messenger”.

But Duncan didn’t care what had happened between the dead cultists.

Reaching deeper into the drawer, he successfully fumbled with a hidden compartment, and after a few moments of fiddling around inside, found a revolver, and a box of bullets in good condition.

The city-state of Prand does not prohibit citizens from carrying guns, it just requires legalization, and a fake antique dealer living in the lower city obviously lacks the funds and status to get a gun license, so this is undoubtedly an illegally possessed weapon – out of prudence, the original owner of this body left the gun in his room instead of taking it with him to the assembly grounds, where he would normally have used it to protect his store, but now it was owned by the Captain.

Of course Duncan knew that this was just an ordinary weapon, not to mention the “anomalies” on the Lost Country, even his own backward-looking flintlock on the ship might have a special power over this revolver – but he was a realistic man, and he knew that he was in the city-state of Prand. He knew that he wasn’t on a ship when he was operating in the city-state of Prand, that the body he was using was flesh and blood, and that much of the city was by no means safe.

After all, he couldn’t just let the pigeons pigeonhole people when they came across anything – Aey moved around too much, and was prone to attracting unwanted attention from the church forces in the city.

Just then, a slight noise suddenly caught Duncan’s attention.

He heard the sound of a key being rubbed from the direction of a store door on the first floor, followed by the movement of a door opening and the sound of hurried footsteps.

Duncan quickly put his revolver away close to his body, and at the same time only then noticed that it was surprisingly already daylight outside the window – he had been working all night in this antique store – while Aey the pigeon suddenly pressed up on his shoulder, “You have a new short message!”

“Quiet,” Duncan immediately glanced at the pigeon and said quickly as he walked towards the door, “Stay in the room until I order you to. Also, if any outsiders are present, do not speak.”

Aye immediately flapped his wings and flew to a nearby cabinet, “Aye captain!”

Duncan left the room at a quick pace, and just as he reached the stairway, he heard the sound of that hurried footsteps already stepping onto the steps, followed by a young and hurried girl’s voice coming from below, “Uncle Duncan? Is that you back?”

In the next second, a girl with long dark brown hair wearing a long brown skirt and white shirt entered Duncan’s line of sight.

The girl looked only seventeen or eighteen years old, thin and small appearance, hair still seems to be stained with a little bit of early morning dew, appearance is not too prominent, just has this age should have the youthful beauty, she stared wide-eyed at Duncan who stood in the stairway of the second floor, her face was surprised and unexpected.

Duncan, however, did not respond, he just stood on the second floor in silence, the sunlight that poured in from a narrow window behind the stairs against his figure, making his expression all hidden in a haze, he just looked at the girl in silence for several seconds before he finally opened his mouth slowly: “What did you just call me?” “Uncle Duncan ……?” There was a moment of surprise on the girl’s face, followed by a slight nervousness, she held onto the stair railing next to her, peering cautiously, seemingly wanting to see the expression on the face of the middle-aged man upstairs in the backlight, “Is something wrong? Have you …… you been drinking again? Hello haven’t been home for a few days …… I just saw the light on the first floor ……”

The girl’s expression and voice fell on Duncan’s eyes and ears, and it was clear that she didn’t yet know how (or hadn’t thought of it at all) to hide her emotional reaction.

According to his own devoured memories, this girl should be his body’s original owner’s “niece”, but also his only relative.

Duncan was vaguely certain that the girl didn’t think there was anything wrong with what she said, and didn’t realize that “Uncle Duncan” was the wrong title from the start.

What had gone wrong? Why did the word “Duncan” come so naturally to this girl, who theoretically could not possibly know his secret?
While his mind was rapidly swirling with conjectures, Duncan also found in the fragments of memory in his mind a little information that corresponded to this girl – the child with dark brown hair, the last figure of the original owner of his body that was still more or less attached to the world.

“Nina,” Duncan’s expression was unchanged, his tone flat, the storm of thoughts in his mind not showing at all, “you stayed at the school yesterday?”

“I live at school these days,” the girl at the bottom of the stairs answered immediately, “I thought you would be out for at least a week, as you always are, so after packing up the house I went to borrow a room from a fellow student …… managing the dormitory Mrs. White, who manages the dormitory, agreed. Today it was a sudden realization that a book had been left at home that made me rush back …… Are you all right? I feel that you …… are strange ……”

“I’m fine, just a little sleepless just now.”

Duncan responded with a natural attitude, then stepped towards the first floor, some sort of extremely outrageous suspicion had flooded his mind, and now he had to go and confirm it.

He and Nina staggered past each other, and the young girl on the stairs sidestepped her body while looking curiously into Duncan’s eyes, before she suddenly asked when the latter was almost on the first floor, “Uncle Duncan, are you going out again afterward? Are you …… going to stay at home for a few more days?”

“…… Depends,” said Duncan, without turning round, for he was not sure that the expression on his face was natural enough; he was only answering the “niece’s” question in the tone of voice he remembered. ” question, “I’ll just go to the door, if nothing else, I’ll be home for the next couple days.”

“Ah okay, then I’ll turn around and go grocery shopping, we don’t have many ingredients at home ……”

The girl said quickly as she stomped up the stairs, her feet flying and her tone carrying a certain lightness.

Duncan, on the other hand, had already made his way to the front of the store, and he took a soft breath as he pushed the door open.

He turned and looked up at the sign hanging in front of the store, a line of letters clearly reflected on the old and dirty sign: Duncan’s Antiques.

The first few letters were as old as the ones that followed, and there was absolutely no sign of temporary modifications, as if it had been that way from the beginning.

Duncan frowned and slowly made his way to the window next to him, he leaned forward and observed his face through the image reflected in the dirty glass.

It was indeed an unfamiliar face, not that of the majestic and brooding Ghost Captain, but that of a bearded, middle-aged man with deep-set eyes and a weary look, belonging to the cultist named Ron who had already breathed his last in the sewers.

Duncan straightened up a little, he heard the urban area slowly coming alive around him, the crisp sound of bells clanging in the doorways of street-facing stores that were open in the early morning, the sound of bicycle bells and the voices of passersby talking gradually filled the street, someone passed in front of the antique store that seemed to be a neighbor who lived next door, and there were greetings that reached Duncan’s ears:

“Good morning, Mr. Duncan – have you seen today’s paper? The Church of the Deep seems to have busted a very large cultist den, and that’s a big deal!”

(End of chapter)