Chapter 125: Chapter 129: The Dark Night
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Homeloss set sail at full speed.
In the pale glow cast by the Creation of the World, the semi-translucent sails of the Spiritual Body filled without wind, as if controlled by countless unseen hands, making squeaking and creaking sounds. The complex system of masts and ropes rapidly and sensitively adjusted their angles. Duncan felt the deck beneath his feet slightly sway and tilt, pointing the ship’s bow towards a certain direction in the Endless Sea. The sound of tiny waves hitting the hull mingled with the “sensory signals” emanating from Homeloss itself, gently reverberating in the depths of his mind.
For some reason, just as the ship changed its course, Duncan felt as if the atmosphere aboard had subtly transformed. The scenery around remained identical, but…
He seemed to hear the ship let out a satisfied, soft sigh.
Duncan left the captain’s cabin and casually walked onto the deck, where he looked up into the night sky, watching the billowing sails and towering masts. He then gently tapped a nearby railing, thoughtfully saying, “Are you also bored with aimless drifting?”
Homeloss did not speak, merely emitting a slight creak from below the deck. Nearby, several ropes made rustling noises, slithering like snakes around Duncan.
“…This isn’t cute, and it’s even a bit scary,” Duncan glanced at the ropes, “Last time, you scared Alice into a frenzied run, didn’t you?”
The ropes shook in place for a moment, then quickly slipped away.
Duncan took a deep breath, preparing to enjoy the refreshing night breeze at sea, but suddenly, a distant “touch” appeared in his consciousness.
At first, he didn’t realize what it was, but then he quickly understood that this sensation originated from Plunder City-State.
Inside an antique shop on the second floor in Plunder City-State, Duncan suddenly blinked and immediately looked in a certain direction—toward the neighboring room belonging to Nina.
In his vision, a cluster of ghostly green flames was flickering rapidly—not from Nina, but from the mark left on Sherry.
The cluster of flames sensed the growth of Transcendent power, and perceived that the host’s emotions were fluctuating abnormally.
What happened to Sherry?!
Duncan didn’t hesitate much, as he got up and rushed to Nina’s bedroom door, knocking lightly, but there was no response from inside.
He hesitated for a moment, but the next second, he sensed the mark on Sherry pulsate again.
There wasn’t time to think too much—Duncan pushed open Nina’s room door.
As usual from when she was a child, Nina had the habit of not locking her door while sleeping.
The bedroom was dim, with only the faint light from a streetlamp outside casting shadows of the room’s contents. Within his range of sight, Duncan saw nothing abnormal.
Sherry and Nina were quietly sleeping on the bed, one’s head towards the foot of the bed, and the other lying horizontally on the other’s belly.
…Their sleeping positions were quite artistic.
Of course, Duncan wasn’t interested in how the girls were positioned. He now noticed Sherry’s furrowed brows, and on her arm, which she normally used to summon her Abyssal Hound and coexist with her chains, a thin black pattern was slowly creeping.
Duncan frowned slightly, then activated the mark left on Sherry, trying to use the unique properties of the Spiritual Body fire to locate the source of the “Corrosion” in the room.
In his view, Sherry’s current state, combined with the warning from the mark, unequivocally signaled that Transcendent power was causing Corrosion.
A tiny green flame rose beside Sherry, its ghostly light illuminating the surroundings, but the flickering flame eventually remained stationary.
There was no Corrosion in the room.
Duncan’s brow furrowed as he moved closer, observing Sherry’s tightly knitted brows.
Uncertain of how much the Spiritual Body fire would affect a living person, he couldn’t release a large burst of flame to “scan” the entire room like he would in a factory, but even the slightest spark of Spiritual Body fire should have reacted to unfamiliar Transcendent powers.
Corrosion… not in the real world? On a mental level? Or something else?
Duncan pondered for a moment, then seemingly thought of something, and quietly left the room, closing the door behind him as he returned to his own bedroom. There, he saw Ai Yi napping on the windowsill.
“Spirit Realm wander.”
Among a series of “cooing” protests from Ai Yi after being awakened, Duncan entered the dark space filled with endless twinkling stars again. He then calmed himself and—as he had sensed the White Oak and Fenna before—sensed his own “marks” among the surrounding stars.
This was not difficult because the mark was intentionally left by him, far clearer and more stable than the “sparks” on Fenna. Almost instantly, Duncan locked onto the starlight belonging to Sherry…
In the darkness, Sherry opened her eyes to find herself sleeping in a bed both familiar and strange.
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She groped in the darkness and sat up, her mind sluggish for quite some time before she slowly regained clarity. She looked around in confusion, finally distinguishing some outlines of objects from the darkness.
Memories, familiar yet distant, began to awaken as she could clearly see her surroundings, and Sherry finally opened her eyes wide.
The next second, she jumped off the bed, emitting a string of curses that were extremely irritant, even trembling, displaying signs of fear and tension through her shaking voice: “Damn, damn, damn… X! FMD, not this again, not this again! My X!”
Her loud swearing shattered the tranquility of the darkness, yet the curses didn’t belong to the Sherry she recognized but to a younger, more juvenile voice that only existed in her memories. She landed on the floor, noticing her arms and legs had returned to their thin, childlike state. She wore a light pink nightgown, identical to one from her memories, complete with a familiar, clumsily stitched little dog on a torn sleeve cuff.
“No fucking hassle me anymore! No fucking hassle me anymore!”
Sherry shouted in the dark room, rushing toward the closed door, punching and kicking the mottled wooden boards. However, the door remained immovable, as solid as if made from reinforced concrete. She used her head to ram and her teeth to bite at the doorknob: actions purely for venting that proved utterly futile. She could only keep banging herself against it with her petite body as time passed, as the morning light began to seep through a nearby window, as the last voice she wanted to hear at this dawn approached from outside.
She heard someone getting up in the neighboring room, footsteps, sounds of tidying up.
She heard one set of footsteps approaching the door, a very gentle, very familiar voice softly inquired, “Sherry, Sherry? Are you up? Are you still angry?”
Sherry suddenly halted her assault on the door, as if drained of all strength, she leaned against the wooden panel, using all her might to stick close to it, not wanting to listen yet greedily catching every noise coming from outside.
“Sherry, Dad and I are going to buy you a cake, today is your birthday… Let’s not be angry when we return, okay?”
“Don’t go…” Sherry suddenly spoke, initially a faint murmur, but soon the murmuring turned into screams, “Don’t go… Don’t go! Don’t leave! Don’t leave!”
She finally began to cry and shout, knowing it was futile, yet screaming aloud: “Don’t leave! Don’t go out! Don’t go out, damn it! Don’t go out!”
However, time moved to the next second, as if etched into her brain, the memories could not be rewound—the footsteps outside faded.
The sounds of picking up a bag, the distant and blurred conversation of her parents, the door handle turning, opening the door, closing it, the keys turning once and then half a turn.
Sherry slowly sat down in the darkness, beginning to count her heartbeats.
By the one thousand two hundredth heartbeat, cries of alarm from a fire came from afar.
By the one thousand six hundredth heartbeat, the acrid smell of smoke and suffocating fumes began to seep through the crack under the door.
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By the one thousand eight hundredth heartbeat, the streets were already filled with frantic shouting, and a blinding red light flooded through the windows as if the entire City-State had been cast into molten magma.
By the two thousandth heartbeat, a heavy, muffled thump came from the direction of the front door—it had been broken through, as if some gigantic beast were stepping heavily towards the locked room step by step.
Then, the door of the room finally fell down—the wooden door, which Sherry could never have opened with all her strength, now shattered like torn paper.
A terrifying creature appeared there, a massive black demon dog, a nightmare assembled from bones, shadows, smoke, and scorching ashes. To a six-year-old child, this demon from the Abyss seemed almost overwhelmingly large, and now its empty, blood-red eye sockets had already locked onto the “living being” in the room.
Sherry calmly stared at the Abyssal Hound that had appeared before her.
This was an Abyssal Hound—but not yet her “A-Dog.”
Not the one with a “heart,” not the one that would rummage through the trash for food to feed itself, not the one that tried to tell lame jokes to amuse her but ended up teaching her only a string of swear words.
The Abyssal Hound stepped into the room.
The sounds of flesh and bone being chewed filled the air.
Sherry lay on the floor, feeling her limbs being devoured by the demon dog, the heart-wrenching pain piercing through the veil of her eleven-year-old memory, spreading slowly and numbly in her mind as she continued to count her heartbeats, wondering when A-Dog would truly become her A-Dog, and calculating how much longer she would have to stay here—based on past experience, was it a week? Or two?
Her consciousness gradually began to scatter, even in this pitch-black Dreamscape, the distant, dull, and numb pain finally caught up to her, and through her increasingly blurred vision, she suddenly saw a figure appear on a bed not far away, within the deepest shadows of the darkness.
That figure seemed not to have appeared suddenly; it was as if it had always been there, from the beginning of this dream, from every dream, and even—Sherry didn’t know why she would come up with such a startling thought—even from eleven years ago.
There he sat, yet it was only now that she had noticed his presence for the first time, as if the long-standing fog had suddenly parted, allowing her to glimpse the existence behind it.
A faint, eerie green flame appeared from nowhere, illuminating the face of the figure, somber and majestic—Sherry had never seen this face before, but she felt an inexplicable sense of familiarity.
“No offense intended.”
The somber and majestic figure spoke.
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