Chapter 32: Breakfast on the Lost Country
Chapter 32 Breakfast on the Lost Country
As the night faded and the pale scar that had taken over the entire sky faded, Duncan stood on the aft deck and gazed up at the sky, not letting go of any of the slightest details of this alternating moment of day and night.
He saw the scar become transparent and illusory as if it were a waking dream, and the grayish-white light mist escaping from its surroundings first merged with the sky, and then with the scar itself – and throughout the whole process, the position of the “scar” did not change! The position of the “scar” never changed during the whole process.
Duncan blinked, and further speculation began to grow in his mind: did the fact that the mark in the sky did not change position mean that it was not some distant astronomical structure? Did it mean that it was just some kind of phantom “imprinted” in the background of the atmosphere, moving in synchronization with the infinite sea?
Or is it due to the fact that the planet on which the Boundless Sea is located (if this is indeed a planet) is synchronized with the scar? Or maybe the scar was actually moving, but due to the short observation time, it could not be detected with the naked eye?
All kinds of conjectures in his mind, but Duncan knows very well, before there is sufficient evidence and reliable experimental verification, these conjectures are just conjectures, a natural phenomenon behind the possible explanations for a thousand, but the lack of theory and evidence to support everything is empty talk.
The round of “sun” rose.
The first was the golden light emerging from the line between the sky and the sea, followed by a huge luminous structure surfacing abruptly, accompanied by a brilliant haze, the light orb locked by the double runic structure appeared in Duncan’s field of vision.
The sun rose solemnly under the slow operation of the runic structures, a majestic process that seemed to have a certain sound to it – some kind of low, powerful, sluggish rumble echoed illusorily in Duncan’s mind, but when he did gaze upon it, the sound suddenly disappeared.
He frowned, wondering a little if he had just hallucinated, but the memory of the sound was so vivid that he simply could not deny it.
Was that …… the sun’s announcement to this world as it rose? Or perhaps it was just one of the many illusions brought on by the Infinite Sea?
No one could answer Duncan’s questions, and as always, the vastness of the Boundless Sea kept all its secrets.
Aye the pigeon crouched comfortably on Duncan’s shoulder as usual, and then he stood up quite suddenly, flapping his wings and looking out to sea as he shouted, “Whole fries! Whole fries!”
Duncan couldn’t help but laugh, he looked at this strange pigeon, suddenly felt that it was not bad to have such a bird in the room – this pigeon’s strange words that came out from time to time could always make him feel a sense of “hometown affinity”.
“Pity there’s no fries on board,” he said, casually ruffling the pigeon’s beak and turning in the direction of the captain’s cabin, “but you’re right about getting something to eat.”
A few moments later, the captain of the Lost Country had prepared himself a traditional breakfast of Ghost Ship specialties – in the captain’s cabin, Duncan had used the sailing table as a dining table directly, placing a few plates on the empty tabletop next to the charts – and today’s breakfast was the same jerky and cheese with plain water as yesterday’s dinner, yesterday’s lunch, and every meal in the past.
Duncan sat down at the nautical table, carefully and ceremoniously laying out a napkin for himself, the goat’s head staying still across from him, the cursed mannequin Alice, who had come running to greet him early in the morning, to his left, and the odd pigeon crouching on the tabletop to his right.
Duncan suddenly felt that this scene began to fit his own persona as the “Ghost Captain” – the wooden goat representing the devil, the cursed dolls that could not be discarded, the bird of speech with otherworldly knowledge, and the Ghost Captain sitting in the main seat. This can be photographed and used as the cover of a movie without having to be repaired. ……
But the current state of the food on the Lost Country is something only the people involved know how it is.
Duncan sighed and looked down at the contents of his dinner plate – the movie poster-like opening scene was over, and what followed was the real life of faggots on the Lost Country.
He picked up his dinner knife and sliced hard at the cheese, a squeaking sound resounding in the friction of the hard object, and he poked the jerky next to him with his fork, which clashed with the plate with a crisp clink.
Alice watched the scene curiously and finally couldn’t help but ask, “Captain, same meal today as yesterday, huh?”
“Tomorrow’s will be the same,” Duncan glanced up at the cursed mannequin, “You want to try it?”
Alice thought for a moment and picked up a strip of jerky directly in her hand, put it in her mouth and chewed it hard twice, followed by yucking it up, “It’s not good at all!”
“You can’t eat it even if it tastes good – do you have a stomach?” Duncan reached out and took away the remaining half of the jerky in Alice’s hand, “You’re really trying when I let you try.” With that, he gave the food on his plate another somewhat fretful look.
It was all he could find on the ship, the jerky tasted like salted cardboard and the cheese was like loose, sandy firewood, and no matter how he handled it, it had a strange odor, he had tried to boil the jerky in water or bake it or fry it, but he hadn’t been able to get the texture or taste of it to change for the better after all the effort he had put into it.
The good news was that at the very least the food wasn’t rotting and wouldn’t poison anyone, the bad news was that the force of the passing years was still transforming the unrotten substance into something extremely unrecommended for swallowing – Duncan had every reason to believe that the cheese was several rounds older than he was, and the jerky, if it was still alive, had at least seen the rise and fall of a century’s worth of storms.
The captain of the Lost Country might not have to worry about scurvy, but Duncan still aspired to a healthy diet – at the very least, he wanted the food on his plate to be a little younger than he was.
Same age would be fine.
Yesterday’s mental calculations of the Lost Country’s resupply program and the land exploration program came back to mind.
However, they could not be realized overnight.
Duncan sighed and continued to cut the “firewood” on the plate with a vengeful attitude, while Ai, who had been looking at the table next to him with a crooked head for half a day, came over curiously, and this bird first looked at his master, and then looked at the things on the plate: “Insufficient reserves of crystalline ore? ”
Duncan glanced at the pigeon, casually pinched a bit of fallen cheese crumbs thrown to it, Ai lowered his head and pecked twice, and immediately stood there motionless with a sudden stiffness as if the computer was dead. ……
The bird was so stiff for three or four seconds, before suddenly moving, it flapped its wings and flew to the nearby shelf, letting out an exasperated voice: “I’m starving to death today, dying outside, jumping from here, and I won’t eat ……”
Duncan felt a little hurt, while across the table the goat’s head, which had managed to be quiet for half a day, finally couldn’t help but start to make creaking, crunching sounds of wood rubbing together.
Before the bastard drilled himself for fire, Duncan finally nodded, “If you have something to say, say it.”
“Yes captain,” the goat’s head finally had a chance to speak, and immediately raved, “I’ve been wanting to ask since yesterday, this …… person you brought here is called ‘Aye’, right? ‘ right? How come I can’t understand what it says? Yesterday I thought about it all night, what exactly does charging Q coins mean?”
Duncan instantly raised his eyebrows – he was truly surprised that this goat-head could hold back his question until this point, and that he had underestimated the bastard’s self-control!
“You needn’t be concerned, the bird has an odd mind,” Duncan didn’t stop the carpentry work in his hands, but casually blurted out a long-thought out pretext while making adz chiseling and axe-sawing noises with the knife and fork in his hands, “It seems to communicate with people in a set of languages that only it understands, and if you listen to it more than once, you’ll be able to probably guess what it means.”
“Is that so?” The goat head pondered, “But I always feel as if there is some kind of logic hidden in its words …… as if there is a complete, self-contained set of knowledge hidden behind that language …… Did you walk in the spirit world during the process of You’re walking in the spirit world and you found Aey? Could it be some kind of projection from the depths? You know, the deeper you go the more information from misplaced time and space will surface in the form of projections, and there is no lack of certain fragments of lost eras, or even the future, that we have not known, so perhaps Ai is talking about another time and space?”
The cutting work in Duncan’s hands paused for a split second with an imperceptible magnitude to the naked eye, followed by everything as usual, while saying in a flat tone, “Then good luck in summarizing the logic behind Aey’s language.”
The goat-head’s words might have been a casual guess, but the information revealed in them inevitably sent waves through Duncan’s mind!
During his walk in the spirit world, his soul approached the “deeper” levels of this world? The deeper you go, the more you will see projections from the wrong dimension? Those projections may even show scenes from different timelines?
Duncan didn’t see any “scenery from a different timeline” when he was walking in the spirit world, but the goat head was right about one thing – Aey was indeed from another time and space.
Then …… this pigeon was actually brought to this world by the earthling named “Zhou Ming”, or is it really from the deeper layers of this world, as Goathead said?
(End of chapter)