Chapter 161: Chapter 165 Lucresia’s Pressure
Accompanied by a series of strange noises, the clockwork automaton stiffened and came to a complete halt like a rusted machine, and at almost the same moment, Lucresia in a nearby chamber sensed the anomaly in her creation.
The cabin door was flung open violently, and a whirlwind of colorful papers swirled into the room, converging into a human form. The “Witch of the Sea,” Lucresia, stepped out from the flurry of papers, and at first glance, saw Luny, who had slumped and was sitting by the table, her head hanging low.
“Luny?” Lucresia hurried forward, and immediately noticed a winding key that had fallen onto the floor beside her. She picked up the key, then proceeded to tap on the mechanism on the back of the clockwork puppet, “What happened?”
A series of intermittent creaks came from inside Luny, and after a moment, some of her parts finally resumed function, and a severely detuned and deformed voice rose from her chest cavity, “Old master… is looking for you…”
With a clang, the winding key in Lucresia’s hand dropped to the ground.
Luny turned her head toward the sound, instinctively reaching out to feel for her winding key, wanting to insert it back into her back, but her motion seized up halfway, and the sound of gears idly turning ensued.
Lucresia’s complexion changed dramatically at the mention of “old master,” her pupils quivering, but the sound of malfunctions inside Luny quickly jolted her back to reality. She shook her head abruptly, forcibly suppressing the myriad of chaotic thoughts while embracing the clockwork automaton’s shoulders, “Luny, standby.”
The clockwork puppet slowly closed its eyes, “Command received, Luny is beginning standby.”
Moments later, in a brightly lit chamber deep within the Brilliant Starship, Lucresia was bustling beside a workbench.
This was a laboratory that even the headquarters of the Academy of Truth might describe as “fully advanced,” with a spacious room equipped with intricate mechanical devices and pressure pipelines supplying energy to various systems. Amidst the countless machines were auxiliary equipment inscribed with magical runes, and many glowing crystal containers and reactor vessels. A dozen automated automata were tending to these self-operating devices, allowing Lucresia to concentrate fully on the work in front of her.
Before the “Witch of the Sea,” Luny lay quietly on a large workbench.
The clockwork automaton had been disassembled, the replica maid’s dress set aside. Her aurichalcum skeleton and various brass mechanisms nearly covered the platform, with only the part of her above the chest remaining intact, positioned at the edge of the platform. She stared blankly at her dismembered body, occasionally blinking.
“Can… repair… good?” The untuned voice sounded from Luny’s chest cavity.
“Don’t worry, it’s just that the transmission mechanisms suddenly seized, causing deformation of the bearings,” Lucresia said actively working without looking up, “It’s a lot of work, but the repair process itself isn’t complicated—your ‘heart’ isn’t damaged.”
Luny slowly turned her eyeballs, observing her “heart” placed at the center of the workbench.
It was a delicate brass sphere, composed of countless complex and precise metal pieces. It hovered quietly over a pile of parts, its metal plates shifting positions occasionally, revealing the inscribed structure within. When the plates aligned at the proper angle, one could clearly see the bright runes etched inside, and at the center of those runes floated an even finer object.
That was a segment of a finger—extremely delicate, and very fragile, finer than that of a human infant, crafted meticulously by a Puppeteer a hundred years ago.
This was the true core, the true essence of the automaton “Luny”—the last testament of a puppet from a hundred years ago left in this world.
Lucresia noticed Luny’s gaze and looked up, her own movements halting for a moment.
After a brief pause, she resumed her busy work and spoke almost casually, “I transformed you like this, have you ever resented it?”
“Luny… why resent?” the automaton’s head on the workbench uttered in a stiff voice, “Mistress… gave Luny life, for which… Luny is happy…”
“But all of this was initially just a whim of mine—and for that whim, I discarded your original body,” Lucresia said calmly, “For a very long time at the start, I wasn’t aware that you developed real thought due to the border’s influence. I just thought of you as a machine and conducted many reckless ‘experimental modifications’.”
Luny did not respond to her mistress but, after being silent for a moment, suddenly said, “You’re tense, you’re preoccupied—under normal circumstances, Mistress wouldn’t talk about these nonsensical things.”
Lucresia was silent for two or three seconds, “…do you remember what you said just now? After I arrived at the dining room and woke you up.”
“…Memory retrieval failed, Luny does not remember.”
“You told me, ‘old master’ is looking for me.”
A series of strange noises came from the chest cavity of the clockwork puppet, not due to malfunction, but from confused thought processes.
“Do you really not remember?” Lucresia lifted her head, quietly watching Luny’s eyes.
“Memory retrieval failed, Luny does not remember.”
“…Then it seems my fearsome father does not want to give me any chance to probe into his affairs,” Lucresia’s face revealed a complicated smile, she slowly dismantled a deformed gear, her tone somewhat elusive, “He just sent a one-sided signal, telling me… he knows where the Brilliant Starship is, he knows how to find me…”
“You’re afraid.”
“Frightened to death—but more than fear, what I’m feeling is a kind of… sorrow.”
“Sorrow? Why?”
Lucresia looked into Luny’s eyes, and after a long time, she gently shook her head, “This emotion is too complex for you; you probably can’t understand it yet.”
“Okay, Luny will try to understand in the future,” the clockwork doll replied and then asked another question, “Do you think the old master is giving you some kind of warning?”
“…I don’t know, but it indeed seems like a warning,” Lucresia whispered, “almost like a declaration before a hunt… He’s returned from subspace, and he’s become more elusive than the last time he came back. Maybe I should remind my brother…”
“You should indeed remind Mr. Terian. He has already set off for Plunder, and the Governor of Plunder said that the Homeloss is approaching that city-state.”
Lucresia nodded slightly and didn’t say much else, simply continuing to busy herself.
…
Duncan carefully placed “Niru” into the antique wooden box and returned the feather-shaped hairpin to the drawer.
Then he stared at the wooden box containing “Niru,” worried.
As a grown man, he always felt that having a doll with a girlish style in his own bedroom was somewhat inappropriate.
But apart from keeping it in his bedroom, he couldn’t think of a better place.
Even though the first test hadn’t yielded any results and no clues leading to anything transcendent had been discovered within the doll “Niru,” it was, after all, an item related to “Lucresia.” Since he wasn’t sure if it might be of use in the future, he dared not let the doll out of his sight.
After much deliberation, Duncan still sighed and temporarily placed “Luny’s” box by his bedside.
“If you really have something special about you, you’d better ‘show your hand’ quickly,” he said to the ornate classical box, shaking his head slightly, “Don’t be like Alice. You don’t have to be thrown into the sea before you perform any feats against the storm-tossed waves.”
Of course, the wooden box didn’t respond, but Duncan didn’t care.
He walked to the window and glanced outside at the sky.
Night had fallen, and the Creation of the World’s pale, gloomy light was shining over the Endless Sea.
The powerful force from the sun that dispelled evil was fading in the real world, and twisted, ominous, corrosive forces were gradually rising throughout the world. At this time, humans entered the Dreamscape, seeking refuge from the world’s interference with their sanity.
But for Duncan… he had never felt any discomfort in the night, nor had he ever seen those shadows that filled ordinary people with dread.
Night was the time when his thoughts were sharpest.
He returned to his desk and quietly spread out a sheet of white paper, then picked up a steel pen from beside it.
These were things he had just bought from the Plunder City-State.
After a short contemplation, he wrote down lines of text:
In 1889, the Sun Shard appeared, sparking the great Plunder fire;
Underneath the Sixth District factory’s curtain, there lies a “reality” destroyed by the fire;
Within the community church of the Sixth District exists a suspected locked time loop, where two completely opposite realities overlap inside the church;
The “humanity” of Mr. Dog is of unknown origin, but it’s clear his influence isn’t from the Sun Shard’s power;
The statue of the goddess inside the Sixth District church is suspected to be influenced by subspace rifts, the Nun in the Underground Sanctuary seems to have perished in the struggle against the subspace invasion…