Ashes Of Deep Sea Chapter 789

Chapter 789: Chapter 786 Another Alice's Mansion? Chapter 789: Chapter 786 Another Alice's Mansion? Having coordinated multiple times before, Alice revealed the keyhole on her back with practiced ease and sat obediently on the bed, waiting for the captain to wind the spring key.

Duncan held the brass key with the loop handle and slowly approached it towards Alice's keyhole, but just then, he suddenly heard the automaton speak up, “Captain, I have a question.”

Duncan immediately stopped his movement, “A question?”

“You said that this key is for the routes to the other three 'nodes' on the external barrier, and that I'm something… the Navigator Number Three, right? That means, with the routes, I could take you far away, even to the ends of the world…”

Alice spoke, her tone hesitant, as if struggling for a moment to find the right words to express her thoughts. Duncan didn't rush her, and just patiently waited–after a while, the automaton seemed to finally streamline her thoughts and continued, “Then tell me, are there other 'routes'? Or rather, if I don't have this new key, could I still try to take you to other places on my own?”

Duncan felt a bit puzzled, “…why are you suddenly thinking about this?”

“I'm just… suddenly curious about myself,” Alice said casually, “It seems I've never considered these questions before. I busied myself every day on the ship, and I was content doing things I liked, but it seems unlike me, everyone else is different… They all know exactly what they want to do, that thing called… oh, a sense of mission. It seems everyone has a strong sense of mission, except me…”

The automaton suddenly stopped, thinking seriously, “Should I also have one?”

“…there's nothing that one should or shouldn't have,” Duncan shook his head, “However, I don't discourage you from thinking more about yourself and understanding who you are–understanding oneself is part of growth, and that's a good thing.”

“Can automatons also grow?” Alice asked, curious.

“Yes, as long as there's willingness, anyone can grow. You have already grown a lot since you first came on board–the growth of knowledge is growth, making more acquaintances is growth, going to more places, seeing more landscapes, all of that is growth. As long as today's you is different from yesterday's you, for you, that is growth.”

Alice nodded in semi-understanding, then after thinking for a moment, suddenly realized something happily, “Ah, then forgetting a few words I learned yesterday morning, is that growth?”

Duncan suddenly fell silent, “…”

Alice, “Captain? Captain, why aren't you speaking?”

“…Sometimes what I say can be imprecise,” Duncan said, his expression blank as he focused on the keyhole on Alice's back, “You need to understand it dialectically.”

Alice thought about it but didn't understand–because she didn't know what “dialectically” meant.

But she felt the captain was right, so she nodded happily, “Okay, then I have no more questions! I'm ready, wind me up please!”

Duncan took a breath, quickly rid himself of his scattered thoughts, and then carefully inserted the brass key into the doll's keyhole.

A familiar clicking sound emerged, as the spring key, seemingly drawn in by itself, slid into the keyhole. Immediately after, the complex and ornate patterns surrounding the keyhole faintly lit up–the spring key began to turn on its own, emitting soft clicking noises.

The next second, Duncan felt that familiar dizziness and sense perception reset rushing in from all directions, and then darkness fell like a curtain, shrouding everything around. Soon, a cool sensation swept over him–as if he had passed through an invisible gate, and in the darkness, fragments of light and shadow quickly reassembled and stabilized into a spacious, ornate but dimly lit and eerie place.

Duncan quickly snapped out of his trance, and after shaking off the dizziness, immediately looked around in all directions.

He found himself still in that grandiose mansion, the incredibly wide living room, corridors carpeted in dark red, the spiral staircase leading to the second floor, the tall, narrow Gothic pointed windows, and the somber chandelier hanging from the ceiling, as if it were always slightly swaying.

Almost instantly, he noticed that the surroundings were different from his memory of “Alice's Mansion”–the lighting was dimmer, and the pale glow from those candles was like a thinly veiled gauze covering a limited area, leaving most corners of the mansion draped in darkness; the ceiling was more dilapidated, and in some parts of the peeling dome, the framework, almost skeletal in nature, could be vaguely discerned, but between the gaps of the framework, there was only a chaotic grey-white to be seen.

A more sinister, more eerie atmosphere enveloped this place than he remembered of “Alice's Mansion,” and even in the darkened corners close at hand, it seemed as if countless invisible lurkers hid, watching the unwelcome visitor with cold and empty gazes.

Duncan frowned, noticing he was currently standing on a platform on the second floor of the mansion. Looking over the edge of the platform, he could see the first-floor hall and the spiral staircase leading down to it. After a moment of contemplation, he decided not to go downstairs but instead turned and walked towards the corridor leading to the deepest part of the second floor.

And just as he turned and took a step, he suddenly perceived another “oddity” here.

Silence, emptiness, no one–there were no headless maids or attendants from the mansion in sight, there were no sounds of servants' activities, and he did not see that headless butler either.

He remembered that in the previous “Alice's Mansion” visit, although it was also spacious, he would still occasionally see the headless servants scurrying past doorways and corridors. Even in rooms and halls that seemed devoid of any presence, he could still hear whispers and the clinking of utensils, and sometimes, faint music as if from a ball taking place–though these sounds, in a vast mansion, made the atmosphere even more ghostly and foreboding, at least there was some “bustle.”

But there was not even that bit of sound here, as quiet as if… dead.

Duncan gradually heightened his alertness, and stepped towards the second-floor corridor.

Throughout the entire grand building, only his monotonous and slightly hollow footsteps echoed.

He stopped before the entrance to the corridor leading to the “mistress's bedroom” and looked up at the nearest wall before his gaze suddenly fixed on a painting.

Many oil paintings hung on the walls of Alice's Mansion, and he still remembered what those paintings looked like–mostly abstract and somber, smeared with large swathes of color depicting scenes like prophecies or historical records. Some of the paintings even depicted the disintegration of New Hope and the “End of Days Redshift,” but here, he suddenly discovered that those paintings… had been replaced.

The closest painting to him was a bunch of crude, abstract shapes–a naive pencil line on white paper sketched Sherry swinging a dog by a chain.

Duncan: “…”

After a few seconds of silent silence, he suddenly felt the eerie and strange atmosphere of the mansion dissipate a little, and then he noticed another painting nearby, with messy lines depicting a scruffy bearded “captain” wearing a large hat…

He even began to feel the atmosphere inside the mansion warming up.

This was indeed Alice's Mansion, with certain details inside reflecting the memories and daily life of the doll lady–from some angles, its connection with “Doll Alice” seemed even closer than that of the “normal version” of the mansion.

At least the normal version of the mansion wouldn't hang abstract paintings of the entire crew of Homeloss.

Duncan smiled helplessly and continued deeper into the corridor.

As expected, at the end of the corridor, he saw that vast “void.”

The part that was once the “mistress's bedroom” had disappeared into thin air–just like the room that Lei Nora “drove away” was also a void here.

Duncan stopped before the broken floor at the end of the corridor, bowing his head in thought.

It seemed this was still the Alice's Mansion he knew, only… it was “another version.”

Would winding Alice with a different key lead to different “copies” of the same Alice's Mansion?

So what was the connection between this mansion, which had an even more ominous atmosphere and appeared to be abandoned for a longer time, and the “Shipping Lane”?

Duncan silently contemplated where to begin in order to find clues related to the “Shipping Lane” within this mysterious mansion, and naturally, he thought of the garden–and the doll sleeping amidst the thorns.

But just as he turned to head for the garden, a flash of light caught in the corner of his eye made him suddenly halt.

The light briefly revealed a contour that made Duncan's heart suddenly leap, and he immediately moved towards the glowing object, brushing away the shadows that seemed to cover the air like black gauze–the darkness receded as if it were tangible, and he saw what the object was: something that, no matter how he looked at it, appeared completely out of place here.

A screen, like that of an LCD panel.

The object was “embedded” in the wall at the end of the corridor, with a silvery metallic frame “fused” into the wall panel in some bizarre manner, while the surface that resembled a screen glowed faintly, displaying text and flashing red frames.

Duncan glanced at the text on the “screen” and immediately realized that it was the same as what he had seen on a device in the cave illusion on Holy Land Island. Then the meaning of the text directly presented itself in his mind as information–
“Core escape pod offline–unauthorized release, operation unauthorized.”

Duncan stared at the text for a few seconds before he slowly came to understand and turned to look again at the fragmented edge and the “giant void” at the end of the corridor. After flipping the “navigation segment of New Hope” and “Alice's Mansion” back and forth in his mind, he finally grasped an obvious fact that he had not understood until today.

The Frost Queen had driven away the escape pod of New Hope…

No wonder she could travel to the ends of the earth in her own “house”–that thing was a spaceship's escape pod!

Chapter end

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