Chapter 494 – The Stolen Room
Chapter 494 – The Stolen Room
With uncountable questions and conjectures in his mind, Duncan kept the brass key close to him, and Alice waited honestly beside him, her eyes darting around like a child expecting a secret.
“Do you feel anything different now?” Duncan asked, looking Alice in the eye.
“A different feeling?” Alice cocked her head and raised her hand to touch her back before shaking her head after a moment, “Just a moment ago it felt a little itchy there at the keyhole, now it doesn’t.”
Duncan frowned at that, “…… Nothing else? Just this?”
“Nothing,” Alice replied honestly, followed by a somewhat curious look, “Should there be anything? You look so serious …… are you figuring out the key thing?”
Duncan’s brow furrowed, and after a moment’s hesitation, he finally organized his thoughts and words, and sat down on the bed across from the mannequin, and spoke with a serious expression, “You may have felt only a moment pass, but I was in a peculiar place for a long time – it was an ancient, huge mansion. It is …… called ‘Alice’s Mansion’.”
The Gothic doll’s eyes widened a little, listening to the Captain in amazement and confusion.
Duncan didn’t hide his experience at Alice’s Mansion, he told the doll lady in front of him everything he saw and heard there, and then mentioned what he had seen and heard in the deep sea, including his meeting with the Frost Queen, Rae Nora.
Of course, he knew that Alice might only be able to understand part of it, and even the part she did understand would only be sparsely comprehended, and the things she could remember afterward would be very limited, but he still chose to tell everything.
Because this is what she should know – not to hold the mentality of “she can’t understand anyway” and then take the liberty of hiding it from her, this is the minimum respect.
Alice froze and heard the end, and it wasn’t until another ten seconds or so after Duncan’s words had fallen that the gothic doll snapped out of it, “…… Wow.”
Immediately after that she scratched her hair with confusion and a slight apology on her face, “I …… don’t understand much of what I’m hearing, and I feel dizzy in the head …… I’m sorry, Captain, you’ve gone to so much trouble to help me figure all this out, but it seems like I’m a little stupid ……”
“No, you’re not stupid, it’s just that these things are overly complicated,” Duncan laughed and shook his head knowing that this was surely the other’s reaction, “Even in my heart I feel that these things are full of mysteries – there are too many clues and they’re too scattered, and obviously a long way from tearing away the final fog.”
Alice nodded half-understandingly, and after some more serious thought, suddenly became a little curious, “Are there a lot of people in that ‘public house’? And none of them have heads?”
“I only saw one who called himself a butler, but according to that butler, there were indeed many people in the public house, they were just all hiding,” Duncan said as he recalled, “Also from what I observed, those would have been headless retainers.”
Alice frowned and muttered while trying to think, “Could it have something to do with my ‘decapitation’ ability ……”
“There is this possibility, it cannot be ruled out that some of the attendants are the souls of people who were once beheaded by you,” as someone who has known about “Alice’s Guillotine”, Duncan of course thought of this direction, but then he changed his mind,” But according to some information revealed by the steward, the public house is gathered in a large number of ‘drifting gathering’ of souls, they are like some kind of exiles, accepting the shelter of the public house, this part of the squire is not quite like the beheaded ……”
He paused, and after a little thought continued, “Perhaps it is your guillotine ability that has caused all those souls gathered in the public house to assume a headless posture, regardless of what their exact ‘source’ is.”
“Oh ……” Alice seemed to understand, then immediately afterward she seemed to think of something, “What about that ‘Frost Queen’? Did it really just disappear?”
“The room has indeed disappeared,” Duncan nodded, “It looks as if, as she said herself, when the Ancient God’s tentacles that served as the ‘connection point’ were destroyed, the ‘Driftlands ‘ will be unbound, like an untied cable ……”
He stopped abruptly, a thoughtfulness in his expression.
“Captain?” Alice looked at Duncan uncertainly, “Why have you suddenly stopped talking?”
She asked twice in a row before Duncan looked up from his contemplation, a hint of gravity in his tone, “I was wondering if the ‘Driftlands’ that Rae Nora spoke of referred to her room, or the entire Alice Commons.”
“Huh?” Alice didn’t react for a moment, “What difference does it make?”
“If the Drifting Ground refers to the entire Alice Mansion, then when the ‘Connection Point’ was burned down by me, what disappeared should have been that entire mansion, not a single room on the second floor; if the Drifting Ground refers to just the room where she was sleeping, then what is the relationship between that room and the entire mansion ? Or does …… the ‘connection’ between her room and the entire mansion not count as a ‘point of connection’?”
Duncan paused at this and raised his hand to point at Alice again.
“More importantly, I entered that ‘Alice Mansion’ after I turned the clockwork key on you, and it’s obvious that the connection between that mansion and you is the strongest, and you should even be in some sort of ‘one mind’ relationship, if the ‘drifting land’ needs a connection point to exist stably …… then you are obviously the most stable connection point.”
Alice blinked and listened intently, trying to understand – but failing to.
Her virtue was always sincerity, though: “What are you talking about?”
“The room where the Frost Queen slept was ‘torn’ from the main body of the public house, with obvious signs of damage around the edges, at first I didn’t pay much attention to that, but just now it suddenly occurred to me that …… Rae Nora might be hiding something from me had kept some things from me. “The so-called ‘drifting land’ should theoretically refer to the entire Alice Mansion, and that mansion is tightly linked to you, and as far as I can observe there is no tendency to ‘drift’, so it is highly likely that Lei Nora took advantage of me burning the Ancient God’s tentacles, and took advantage of the weakening of some sort of ‘connection’ to forcefully ‘detach’ her room from the main body of the mansion.”
Alice continued to struggle to understand.
But this time, she finally understood most of it.
“You mean the Frost Queen took the opportunity of you setting the fire to ‘drive’ her room away? Like taking advantage of the fog to drive away the ship’s lifeboats?”
Duncan sniffed and looked at the mannequin rather surprised, “That’s a subtle bit of an analogy you’ve got there …… How did you come up with that?”
“Mr. Goathead told me so many stories about how mutinous sailors would take advantage of the fog to steal the ship’s lifeboats, steal the ship’s casks of wine, steal the ship’s cheeses, steal the ship’s salted fish, etc., and then the wise captain of the ship would cross the entire Infinite Sea to snatch the stolen salted fish back… . are you going to catch the Frost Queen who stole the room?”
Duncan listened in stunned silence, and waited for Alice to finish before he bristled with an odd expression, “Let’s not even talk about why a renegade crew member would want to steal a salted fish, and why I’d have to travel across the entire Boundless Sea to snatch a salted fish back – where am I going to find that Frost Queen? Besides, if I’m going to catch that, it should be you, it’s your room she’s stealing from – you’re the mistress of Alice’s Commons.”
“…… Right, oh,” Alice thought for a moment, recognizing the reasoning quite simply, and then shook her head, “I’m not arresting her then, after all, that room was hers in the first place. But …… why would she do that? Didn’t you just say that once a Driftland loses its bonds, it will fly around, and may even fall into subspace, just like an exile-isn’t that a terrible thing?”
Duncan couldn’t help but ponder, speaking slowly in thought, “Yeah, why ……”
He recalled the Rei Nora he had met, recalled the “Frost Queen” who seemed to have been wearing shackles since birth, crowned in shackles and overthrown in shackles, and who had been imprisoned in nightmares even when she fell into the deep sea.
She said she had always slept in a cage, even when the bars were removed.
Now she has escaped – and taken her cage with her.
“Probably for ‘freedom’.” Duncan said softly.
But just for ‘freedom’?
……
The dials on the controls were twitching rapidly, the swaying of the approaching water was becoming more and more pronounced, and through the thick glass portholes some light could be seen spilling down from above in the deep, endless water outside.
Sunlight was appearing in the water column-an indication that the submersible was rapidly approaching the surface.
Yet that gradually filling glow could not completely dispel the oppressive impression left by the deep sea – it was as if something was still rising and escaping from the vast, infinite darkness below the submersible, reaching out with invisible tentacles, opening its arms upwards to detain the unwelcome guests who had once trespassed into the deep sea.
The things Duncan had told himself during the ascent were still swirling in his mind – thrilling, treacherous, bizarre, shocking to all three senses.
Whether it was the soul of the Frost Queen, who had lived in symbiosis with the ancient gods for fifty years in the deep sea, or that horrific possibility that all earthly things held, it was enough to send a deep, piercing chill down the spine of a strong-minded, religious man in the sunlight.
All things on earth are the children of the ancient gods, and the flesh and blood of the ancient gods exists in all beings and is gradually waking up.
Even in the most blasphemous and deviant of filthy texts, no one dares to record such a statement – the craziest of the Annihilationists have only skimmed the surface of such theories as the “Creation of the Profound Lord”.
The sunlight from the sea grew brighter.
The dead body felt no warmth.
Agatha clasped her hands together in front of her chest and silently called out Bartok’s name, wanting to pray to her god.
Yet she could not quiet her mind no matter what.
(End of chapter)