Chapter 752: Walking in the Backlight
Chapter 750 Walking in the Backlight
The captain has arrived.
Almost the instant the uninvited guest in white robes spoke, a swirling green flame rose in the room, and a figure stepped out from the flame.
Sherry immediately jumped up as soon as she saw Duncan, “Captain Captain! This side just now suddenly ran over a Final Preacher! This one seems to be the kind that isn’t crazy, and he says he wants to talk to you ……”
“I know,” Duncan raised his hand to interrupt Shirley’s staggering, while his gaze had settled on the uninvited guest, “I was wondering how long it would take for you to appear before me – I didn’t expect this to came.”
“You knew I would come?” The white-robed old man asked casually, the expression on his face remaining quite calm despite the questioning and unexpected phrasing.
“Sooner or later you would have come, for the ‘Twilight’ has begun, and any member of the Final Survey Team who still has any sense at this point in time would have been happy to meet with me, and it just so happens that I would have loved to have talked to you,” Duncan said, as he gazed around the room, and “…… This is not a good place to talk, we can talk somewhere else.”
As soon as the words fell from his side, Shirley, Dog, and Morris, who was applying various blessings on his body next to him, instantly nodded their heads in agreement ……
That uninvited guest, however, didn’t seem to notice the trio’s reaction, he just looked at Duncan, “That’s fine, let’s go to a place that’s closer to subspace, I’ll feel more comfortable there.”
Go to a place closer to subspace? Duncan frowned slightly when he heard this, but after a moment of silence, he slowly nodded, “Good.”
As soon as Maurice heard this, he subconsciously widened his eyes slightly, “Captain, you confirm that you want to take ……”
“It seems you already know us well.”
The brass carrying lamp released an eerie green fire, the light dispersing the dimness around them, and all that could be heard in the empty bilge corridors was the echoing sound of footsteps, mostly of two people, but Duncan occasionally found only his own footsteps ringing out – the ‘final preacher’ It was as if the “Preacher of the End” wasn’t exactly located in the current reality, sometimes he was like a weightless spirit that didn’t even make a sound as he walked along the old wooden corridors, and sometimes his aura even came close to dissipating, as if he had suddenly gone to an extremely distant place… ……
A short time later, Duncan, brass carrying lamp in hand, and the uninvited guest in the tattered white robes were walking silently through the bilges on the bottom floor of the Lost Country – they had already passed through the lighted, inverted-phase cargo bays, and were now walking down the last corridor, with the ladder to the bilge at the end of the corridor.
Duncan was not to be denied; he had come to the last door and had put his hand to the handle.
“Is it possible that it was I who made first contact with you as well?” The white-robed Final Preacher said calmly with an inexplicable smile on his face, “At least one of them.”
Duncan’s steps suddenly let up and he was quiet for a moment before continuing forward, “But this ship needs it.”
Duncan withdrew his gaze and turned his head to continue walking forward, “I don’t know, I don’t remember your face – it doesn’t matter if you were in the ones I took aboard in the first place anyway, what matters is that at this very moment, you’re here talking to me.”
“If it were not so long ago, I would never have imagined that I would one day be here with an Endbringer in tow – or in such a state of peace,” Duncan said casually, “My first contact with you was not a pleasant.”
A pale traveler in white robes, hunched over, with lines on his face as if they had been inscribed by the ruling sword of time, his sunken eyes glowing with a certain pale golden, metallic hue, his demeanor placid, his smile bemused, the only thing in the depths of his eyes was the quiet flow of years.
“It’s all right,” Duncan waved his hand, “I’ll take care of myself. Shirley, go to the captain’s cabin and bring me my brass lantern.”
It was near the last door that the Preacher of the End broke the silence, “You don’t really need the lamp – it’s for a mortal.”
This was curious, but he remained polite and didn’t ask.
Duncan turned back to the other man, scrutinizing his face through the light.
“…… You are so full of goodwill.” The Endbringer whispered, his tone seeming to carry sincere praise.
“Here we are, the closest thing to subspace on this ship.”
As the words fell from his lips, he had pushed open the dark, heavy wooden door with one hand – the bilge structure behind the door coming into view.
The unquenchable light illuminated the ship’s cabin, and the once shattered bilge structure had been repaired during the previous Lightwind Harbor incident, and now it had been transformed back into a complete shape, with the solid hull that had grown from the spine of the ancient god closing around it, blocking those chaotic light streams and murmuring whispers that had been projected from subspace – the The strange wooden door, on the other hand, still stood in the depths of the ship’s hold, the door closed tightly and standing in silence. Duncan led the “guests” into the cabin, the final preacher followed closely behind him, and raised his head to look around the bulkheads and roofs, and let out an exclamation: “Ah …… you have restored this place! ……”
“You know quite a bit,” Duncan casually hung his lantern on a nearby column and glanced back, “In some timeline I don’t know about, you had others come here?”
“I have seen the remains of it – possibly in the past, possibly in the future,” the white-robed old man seemed to be reminiscing, his brow furrowing slightly, “…… It disintegrated in flames and fell in the darkness, a real and spectacular sight to behold.”
Duncan didn’t respond to the topic, he had been thinking about all sorts of things along the way, and at this point organized his words slightly before asking, “How many other members of the Terminal Survey team are there who have kept their sanity like you?”
Then he paused and added, “I mean at this current point in time.”
The white-robed old man was silent for a moment, his expression still calm, “There’s only me.”
Duncan felt as if his breathing and heartbeat had stopped for half a beat.
And then, he heard the white-robed old man’s voice again, “Captain, do you know what it’s like to grope around in the dark?”
This last Cretan who had maintained his sobriety and sanity spoke calmly, slowly opening his hands as if the eternal darkness was still coiled in front of his eyes –
“It’s been a really long time since the Final Survey Team …… heard that name, and in the first moments after we set out, the name was reduced to dust in history.
“The ‘time’ of this world is finite, that is something we have known from the very beginning, the whole of the Infinity Sea, the whole of the Age of the Deep, is like a delicate clock that has been set to run in advance, we know it can only run for a certain period of time, and our only expectation is to find a way to stop the hands of the watch before they stop Finding the opportunity to ‘wind up’ the world again before the hands stop ……
“Your wise follower is close to constructing the entire ‘world’, and for the first time he has added the axis of ‘time’ to the model of the world, which to our eyes appears more …… real, hard, and cold.
“Our task, is to move along the axis of time, while observing and guiding at every point of divergence on the axis of time that may produce a branch of history, and to do everything possible to extend the lifespan of the shelter, while searching for ways to continue onward and forward at the end of time.
“In terms of our own experience, the process is a bit like …… backlighting while traveling.
“The day that Vision 001 first lit up in the Experimental Field was the beginning of the light, the most stable moment in the entire Asylum, when everything was just coming into being, when resources were plentiful, when the timeline was solid, when everything was beautiful, when it looked like it could even go on forever – and we started from that sunny morning, we left the light behind and made our way to the darkness at the end.
“As we move away from the ‘beginning,’ we see the world decaying, all the tiny and inevitable pitfalls left behind at the beginning of creation expanding into all kinds of deadly dangers, the light fading while the darkness grows, and we turn our backs on the sunlight toward the night, and the farther we go the darker it gets –We did our best to adjust, watching the possibilities in the timeline in an increasingly dim light, in order to be able to delay the darkness …… In a way, we succeeded.
“The original ‘design life’ of this shelter, was eight thousand years – and by avoiding attrition, mitigating chaos, and reducing the load on the ‘sun’, it has overrun by two thousand years by now.
“But in the face of the never-ending river of time, our successes are insignificant and destined to be completely erased.
“At the end of the timeline, there will always be nothing but darkness, and no matter how much we try to continue the light of the ‘beginning’ as far into the future as we can, or pick up bits and pieces of fire along the ever-darkening path, we will never be able to illuminate the endless black wall of the end of time! …… We run headlong into that infinite darkness, groping around, to no avail, and then we recalibrate the entire timeline, revalidate all the possibilities, do everything we can to make the future stretch forward, and then run headlong into the darkness again, again and again …… countless times.”
The white-robed old man lifted his head and gazed into a dark, dreary corner somewhere in this dimly lit cabin, and after a while he continued to speak, “There is no way forward – these were the last words left by the first of our members to lose his mind before he left, and as a member of the forward crew he stayed in the end of time longer than we All of us, he traversed all the possibilities and finally chose to give up, even chose …… to return to the past to ‘correct’ those futile days.
“That was the first of what the world calls ‘The End Preachers’ …… He just lost control not too long ago, and it’s been too long since I’ve met him to remember what his name was.”
Duncan listened quietly, silent for a long time at the moment, before speaking slowly, “And you, keeping your sanity until the end, even came to me sober.”
“Yes,” the white-robed old man turned his head, his gaze falling on Duncan, “because at the current point in time, I came into your sight – when the order of the world falters, the cause can come after the effect. ”
(End of chapter)