Chapter 485 “Heirs”
Chapter 485 “Heir”
The Frost Queen was silent for more than ten seconds, and in those purple eyes that were as clear and calm as jewels, it was impossible to see the slightest bit of her mood at the moment, until this silence almost stagnated into suffocation, and only then did she gently nod her head, “Oh.”
Then she thought again and asked, “Then how is the situation of Frost now?”
Duncan looked her in the eye and spoke in a calm tone, “…… Tirian is the new consul, the Sea Mist Fleet is taking over the city-state in full force, and what remains of the Frost Navy will be consolidated and reorganized.”
A small smile appeared on Rae Nora’s face, “Ah, Tirian, one of the possibilities …… Fate is such an indefinable thing, this is not a bad outcome, don’t you think?”
Duncan, however, did not respond, but simply continued calmly, “One more thing, the current rulers of the City State Church are at my command.”
Rae Nora finally revealed a slightly surprised expression as she cocked her head slightly, “Hmm? It sounds like …… you are the actual controller of Frost now?”
“I’m not interested in controlling a city-state – but you could think so.”
“Now I’m getting more and more curious about what exactly happened to make the situation in Frost turn out like this,” Rei Nora’s expression got serious, “I had arranged many things, but your appearance was outside of all the plans, and you mentioned a catastrophe, but it was in my anticipation that even if He had a certain degree of loss of control, the situation would not have deteriorated to the extent you mentioned ……”
“An army of replicas from the deep invaded Frost, and a mirror city-state came close to surfacing into the real world,” Duncan murmured, “A group of cultists detected His escaping power while you were trying to appease this tentacle in the deep- -and the Frost City-State’s continued mining of that boiling gold mine ‘helped’ those heretics to some extent.”
Duncan didn’t hold back next, as he told the former Queen all about what had happened in Frost, including the changes that had been induced by his own meddling.
Rei Nora did not interrupt from beginning to end, she listened quietly until Duncan’s words fell, then she took a long breath and a complex smile appeared on her face, “Compared to the ancient gods in the deep sea, it is indeed the crazy humans who are a bit more terrifying.”
She then paused and sighed like a sigh of relief, “But thankfully, in the midst of the worst of where it was going, there was an end to it that wasn’t too bad – most people survived just fine.”
“Even if the city-state ends up being owned by me, the ‘Subspace Shadow’?” Duncan asked deliberately.
Rae Nora, however, just smiled, then looked Duncan in the eye very seriously, “Then you would like to think that you would be the most powerful Guardian Frost has ever seen.”
“Your attitude towards me is different from others,” Duncan said with some emotion, “Since regaining my humanity, I have come into contact with quite a few people, and most of them appear to be in a state of shock, very few of them are able to maintain their composure from the very first meeting with me, not to mention being as optimistic as you are. ”
Rae Nora shook her head, “This is not optimism, this is the truth, you have regained your humanity and have come to Frost’s aid, then you are naturally the most powerful guardian of this city-state, I know that most people have an instinctive fear of this, but I have embraced my fear for too long, and I am used to looking through it to see things as they truly are.”
“…… Now it is my turn to ask a question,” hearing the Frost Queen’s words, Duncan was silent for only two or three seconds before organizing his words and speaking, “The clone of the Profound Holy Lord . . when exactly did it invade the real world? Will a similar ‘invasion’ happen again?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t give a very clear answer to the first question,” a hint of apology appeared on Rae Nora’s face, “He had already appeared in the deep sea when I sensed His presence, and in the first few encounters, I only heard one voice… …He said He was a faulty replica, and He said He needed to terminate the operation.”
“Contact?” Duncan noticed the word instantly, “How did you initially ‘contact’ Him? And from what you’re saying …… this replicant took it upon itself to tell you the situation, even asking for help?”
Rae Nora nodded gently, “I wonder if you’ve heard that I’m a natural psychic?”
“…… I did hear rumors about that, and they say that you can even know the ancient and modern worlds.”
“The rumors are mostly exaggerated, I can neither foretell the future nor have insight into all things, but at least one thing is correct, a natural born psychic …… can really ‘listen’ to common people’s untouchable ‘Voices’,” Rei Nora seemed to fall into memories, slowly speaking while pondering, “When I was very, very young, I often heard murmurs of unknown origin, or saw strange and bizarre scenes in my sleep, just like most of the innate psychics. These terrible ‘illnesses’ were so dangerous that they even threatened the caregiver beside me a few times-
“Can you imagine? You are caring for a child of two or three years old, and then the child merely dreams in deep sleep, and suddenly deadly whistling and rising, shrinking, writhing shadows appear in the room. …… After realizing that the frequent and ghastly apparitions in the house originated from the youngest child, my parents were forced to send me to the church, and just like any other natural-born psychic, I was handed over to the church, and like any other natural-born psychic, I was given to the church. able beings, I was placed in the care of …… ‘professionals’.
“I grew up until I was twelve years old in the deepest cellar of the cathedral, with heavily armed Silent monks and ascetics as my babysitters, special shackles and neck braces as my toys, a blessed iron cage as my sleeping bed, and the keeper coming to check on me three times a week to make sure that I was still on the side of the human mind- It wasn’t until the day of my twelfth birthday, when my spirit and will tended to thrive and my cognition became clearer, that the Archbishop, believing me to have stabilized on the ‘human’ side, blessed and christened me and declared to the public that I was a human.
“After that, I underwent rigorous training to adapt to and master my gift, while learning to live in peace with my ‘nightmares,’ and over the course of four years, I gradually learned that my ‘dreams’ were essentially a form of communion with the world, and that the murmurs and lights and shadows in the dream world came from those beings who wandered beyond the borders of reality and tried to establish a connection with the real world, and after confirming that my mind was able to withstand it, my mentors taught me to listen to those voices in a special way, and to keep myself in the process …… “And it was during this process that my ‘perceptions’ began to be directed to the deep ocean so frequently that I began to perceive …… His presence.
“Or rather, He began to perceive my presence.
“Every born psychic has their own tendency to resonate, some tend to hear voices from history, and they mostly become outstanding archaeologists and occultists, some tend to hear the voices of the four gods, and they are almost destined to be ‘saints’ as long as they live to adulthood, and the more Unfortunately, they will resonate with subspace – ninety-nine percent of these people won’t be able to leave the church cellar alive, and the few that survive will become extremely rare ‘secret keepers’ or ‘hidden saints’ ‘, retained by the church.
“I, on the other hand, have established a resonance with an ancient god that has awakened in the depths.”
Rae Nora paused, her gaze looking to the end of the room, to the dark chaotic fragmented place, so that the darkness surged under her gaze, the chaotic light representing subspace faded, and the floating island in the infinite depths of the ocean, and the silent ‘pillar’ appeared in the depths of the darkness.
It was her resonance, her nightmare, her fear and responsibility, the beginning and the end.
“In fact, for the vast majority of the time, I couldn’t even hear what ‘He’ was saying – at first, I thought it was because of my own lack of power, my lack of control over my psychic resonance, but as time went on, I realized that the reason was actually in this ‘ancient’ island. The reason for this was actually in this ‘Ancient God’.
“He is incomplete, He is merely a ‘forgery’ mistakenly copied from an even larger individual, who woke up in this deep sea of darkness knowing nothing, and whose confused and broken mind was filled with only one thought – error that terminated immediately.
“He repeated this thought in my mind thousands and thousands of times.”
Duncan finally spoke softly, “So, you opened the Subterranean Abyss program?”
“No, I became the Frost Queen first,” Rae Nora said lightly, “It took slightly more work, but only by taking control of an entire city-state did I have more avenues to investigate and confirm what I had ‘heard’, and In the process, I discovered the anomalies in the depths of the Boiling Gold Mines, and the connection between all of this and the ‘Deep Sea’ – the Subterranean Project was the end result, and I did quite a bit of preparation for that end result.”
Duncan didn’t say anything for a while, but slowly got up from his chair and went to the end of the room, looking thoughtfully at the “landscape” of the Deep that emerged from the darkness, and the tentacles that ran through the Frost “blueprints” like a giant pillar through the sky.
After a long time, he turned back slightly, “So he doesn’t mean any harm?”
“There is no malice or goodwill,” said Rae Nora, “In fact, He doesn’t even have what can be called ‘intelligence’ – only a small piece of messy, fragmented thinking. A small, messy, broken mind that repeats simple judgments, He can’t even comprehend His own existence, and certainly can’t talk about His ‘attitude’ towards those small, fragile beings on the surface of the sea ……
“He simply exists, painfully and confusedly, in this cold darkness, but just such a simple ‘existence’ is enough to subvert our delicate and fragile so-called ‘civilized world’. ”
Duncan cooed softly, “Existence itself is a threat ……”
Rae Nora’s voice then came from behind him a moment later, “Now I can answer your second question.
“Is a similar ‘invasion’ going to happen again – I think …… it is possible, if not certain. ”
Duncan turned back instantly, “Why?”
“Because it wasn’t an ‘invasion’, the Profound Holy Lord didn’t ‘enter’ our reality from His realm – He didn’t need to do that.
“His ‘components’ exist naturally in the real world, in every deep sea, in every city-state, and even in every human being; what happened in the Frosty Deeps was not an ‘invasion,’ but an …… ‘awakening’.”
Rae Nora slowly opened her hands, but with an otherworldly look of calm on her face, as she gazed into Duncan’s eyes and spoke what she had learned, the greatest truth of all, during this half-century of nightmarish slumber-
“Captain Duncan, in a sense, all of us, even the city-state beneath our feet, are children of the ancient gods.”
(End of chapter)