Chapter 593.

Chapter 593 – Stone
After standing for a long time in front of the “room”, which was made up of completely chaotic lines and blocks of color, Duncan turned his head back slightly and watched out of the corner of his eye to see the reaction of the goat’s head on the table.

From the goat’s perspective, the goat’s head should be able to see into the room by now – he wondered how the goat’s head would react to seeing this strange and disorganized room.

But it didn’t react, it just stared calmly in Duncan’s direction with those emotionless black eyes, like a real piece of wood when it didn’t make a sound.

Duncan turned back to the room, and after a brief hesitation, he finally took a step towards the eerie room of misplaced lines.

At the same time, he was ready to force the flames if things went wrong, to wake Silentis and get out of this “dream world”.

But the worst thing he expected did not happen.

He stepped through the door, and a translucent layer of water-like ripples faintly rippled throughout the chaotic room, and then there was no other reaction; the room itself did not collapse, and he himself did not seem to be affected by the chaotic colors and lines.

Duncan stepped deeper into the room, closing the door behind him – the eerie goat-head’s disturbingly silent gaze finally blocked out by the door.

Misplaced colored lines stretched out under his feet, outlined by the lines and surrounded by furniture that looked like something other than what it was, Duncan cautiously observed everything in the room, feeling an eerie atmosphere all around him, and after a few moments, his eyes finally landed on a corner of the “room”.

A few translucent colored lines shivered there, connecting with each other to become a geometric outline, and the center of the shivering outline seemed to be filled with a layer of calm water, vaguely reflecting the surrounding scenery.

Duncan walked in front of the geometric outline, reached out his hand and gently brushed the layer of calm “water”, wisps of green flames then spread on the plane, a moment later, the surface of the reflection of the scene will be clear – it turned into a mirror.

In the next second, the center of the mirror floated with shadows, and Agatha’s figure quietly emerged from it.

The lady in the mirror stared in shock at the misplaced and bizarre place outside the mirror.

“This …… this is what’s behind that door?!”

Duncan nodded gently, “Yes, this is what’s inside the door – the ‘deepest part’ of this place.”

“It looks …… so weird here,” Agatha frowned tightly, “How could this be?”

Duncan, however, seemed to have figured something out as he spoke faintly, “Because on the Lost Country in the real world, Goathead never dared to peek inside the captain’s bedchamber, and it didn’t know what it looked like in this room.”

At least, it didn’t know what it was like inside the room after the Captain had taken up residence in it – that was the part of Duncan’s mind that he didn’t say.

Agatha instantly understood the depth of Duncan’s words.

“Are you saying …… that this ‘Lost Country Ship’ was indeed still ‘created’ by a real-world goathead? ” She said quickly, “It turned the shadow of the Lost Country into this ship sailing in darkness and fog, but it couldn’t restore those parts of the ship that it didn’t understand ……”

Saying this, Agatha suddenly frowned and couldn’t help but shake her head again, “But in the real world, Goathead acts like it knows nothing about all of this, and how did it do all of this ……”

“Perhaps it truly knows nothing,” Duncan said calmly, while his gaze slowly swept around, “I have a bold guess now: this ship, could be one of its dreams.”

“One of its dreams?!” Agatha froze at the words, and then immediately remembered something, a puzzled look appeared on her face, “But it clearly said that it never dreams, or even rests, and I’ve seen it for myself – the first mate it is always awake, including the last time when the Dream of the Nameless One appeared, it had been at the helm, as usual .”

“Because it doesn’t even know it’s dreaming, or even that it can dream, even ……” Duncan paused suddenly at this, and an even bolder idea than the one he’d just had floated irrepressibly to the surface of his mind, and he hesitated for a few seconds before, as if talking to himself spoke softly, “Perhaps our ‘first mate’ never woke up.”

After realizing the meaning of the Captain’s words, Agatha’s eyes slowly widened.

Duncan, on the other hand, spoke again after a moment of silence, “Then, there is only one last question left.”

Agatha subconsciously repeated, “One last question?”

Duncan raised his head and looked at the door that stood in the middle of a mess of lines, and his eyes seemed to look through the door at the “goat’s head” on the table outside, and only after a long time did he speak to himself, “Sasloka is dead, died a long, long time ago… …”

……

Night fell in the desert – very, very suddenly, the surroundings dimmed down, the original diffuse in the sky of the passive light of the sky as if absorbed by something like instantly faded, the quiet night color covers the entire sea of sand, as well as the vast ruins in the sea of sand.

Now, the only thing left in the sky was that huge and disturbing dark red “crack”, the crack was like blood, the edge was like fog, it covered the sky, emitting a huge sense of pressure.

Even a judge as tough as Vanna subconsciously avoided looking up at the “world scar”. But the giants on the same side seemed to have already adapted to all this.

At the edge of the ruins of the city, they found a corner that was not afraid of the wind and sand, this was once part of a solemn building, but now there are only a few melted and twisted dark-colored walls, the giant from the nearby ruins to pick up a lot of grayish-white stones, he piled them up in a corner of the wind, and then took two of them, and patiently tapped them.

The dark silence of the desert and the dark red scars of the oppressive world seemed to him to have ceased to exist, as if only the pounding stones remained in his eyes, and the sound of the pounding echoed monotonously in the night, and went far and wide.

Vanna sat under a wall in a sheltered place, watching the giant’s behavior curiously, and after a long time she couldn’t help but say, “What are you doing?”

“Starting a fire,” the giant said faintly, “It gets cold at night out here.”

“…… But those are just rocks,” Vanna looked at the grayish-white stones that the giant had gathered up, her tone puzzled, “…… Are they stones that can burn?”

“It’s ordinary stones,” the giant didn’t look back, “There’s nothing else here anymore, except sand.”

Vanna opened her mouth, “Then ……”

She didn’t finish her sentence before she was interrupted by a sudden cluster of leaping sparks – tiny sparks erupted from between the stones struck by the giant’s hand and landed among the piles of pale stones on the ground, and the next thing she knew, the sparks were transformed into embers, and bright flames of light rose up from the rocks and grew in exuberance.

Vanna watched the scene incomprehensibly.

“The fire, and the stones, they are the most important things,” said the giant, gazing silently at the flames that burned in the rocks, as if speaking to Vanna, and as if speaking to himself, “the flame that draws the fire is the eye that opens in the night, and the stones that are knocked down are far better than the sharp teeth and claws that are used when they set the branches of trees ignited and knocked the stones against each other, the unthinkable happened ……”

The giant turned his head, his gaze dropping, “Did you know, traveler? The history of civilization began with fire and stone.”

Vanna listened to the giant’s words with seeming understanding and slowly nodded.

Her cultural lessons were not very good, but not so bad that she couldn’t understand the meaning of the giant’s words, she just didn’t understand …… why the giant had to suddenly say this to himself.

This has something to do with the “stone can be lit”?

But the giant obviously did not want to explain further, he quickly returned to his “work” – he put his hand deep into the pile of stones, as if he did not care about the burning of the flames, he took out a piece of blackened stone from the fire, and casually knocked off a corner, making it appear as a “stone”, and then he took out a piece of stone from the fire. He took the blackened stone from the fire, knocked off a corner of it with his hand, giving it a sharp point, and then the giant picked up the huge staff that he had put aside, and, using the sharp corner of the stone, began patiently to carve something into the surface of the staff.

The hardness of the staff and the fragility of the stone’s sharp corners made the giant’s carving slow, often requiring many passes to leave a not-too-deep carving mark on the staff, and frequent re-tapping of the stone to create a new “carving knife”.

On the surface of the huge staff, there are densely engraved marks …… all over the surface of the staff, and those engraved marks are all engraved out like this!
Even after looking at it for a short while, Vanna realized that it was a difficult, slow and desperate task, and she couldn’t imagine how long it had taken the giant, and how much patience it had taken, to leave those countless engravings on that huge cane – she felt that even if she had an endless life span, she was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to do it! such a thing!
And yet the giant simply carved in silence and patience, using the only tool he could find in this world of death – fire-scorched stone.

Vanna finally couldn’t help but break the silence, “…… What are you doing?”

“Recording,” the giant said slowly, “Recording those things I still remember, recording things that have happened in this world.”

He paused and placed his long staff in front of Vanna, raising his hand and pointing to the end of the staff, where there was a thin string of symbols.

“Here they learned to use fire.”

The giant spoke softly, as if with a hint of pride in his tone.

Vanna looked in the direction of the giant’s finger and made out the fine symbols – she had never seen them in detail until now.

Simple lines outlined the silhouettes of two tiny humanoids standing in front of an abstract drawing of a fire, their hands raised in the air as if they were leaping for joy and as if they were worshiping the fire.

For some reason, Vanna suddenly felt a heavy force pressing down on her heart, and she subconsciously looked upward along the cane, at the dense symbols – she soon realized that they were not all pictograms, and that upward along the cane, the pictograms gradually turned into abstract and unfamiliar words, which in turn gradually evolved and into various forms, some diverging into alphabets, others retaining their pictorial structure. ……

Her gaze finally rested on a small blank space at the end of her cane, where a campfire splintered and the firelight reflected and jumped.

Vanna slowly raised her head, her gaze moving along the rough beaten stone and withered arms, eventually landing on the giant’s face.

The heaped-up, wrinkled face was gazing calmly at the fire to one side, motionless as another stone.

(End of chapter)