Duncan was confident in his mory—he happened to rember the appearance of the stone that A Dog had just thrown, and now, he was certain that the stone in Alice’s hand was the very sa one.
A Dog quickly realized what had happened and stared at the stone in the puppet’s hand in astonishnt, "...this coincidence? It landed in your hand!?"
"No, not at all," Alice imdiately shook her head, her face expressing the obvious, "I picked it back up."
"You... picked it back up?" Sherry suddenly wore a flabbergasted expression, her eyes intently fixed on the puppet, "How did you pick it back up? According to what A Dog just said, shouldn’t that thing have randomly ended up sowhere in the Mysterious Deep Sea?"
Alice began to think, seemingly pondering over how to explain to Sherry this process that she herself couldn’t articulate, then gesturing while speaking, "Just as we were discussing how sothing that falls from here could end up anywhere, I got curious about where this stone went, then I found it, and then I just picked it up... just like that..."
While explaining, Alice casually perford a motion of picking sothing out of thin air as if it were a matter of course—but not only was her explanation unclear to Sherry, even the dog was confused.
However, Duncan, standing to the side, suddenly furrowed his brows, his mind leaping to sothing—
When passing through that stagnant starfield, Alice’s abnormal behavior... LH-03, the navigation mainfra!
His expression shifted subtly, and he imdiately bent down to pick up another pebble nearby, showed it to Alice, and then forcefully threw it into the vast darkness outside the floating island.
Just like before, the pebble disappeared from everyone’s sight a few ters after leaving the floating island’s boundary.
Duncan turned back to look into Alice’s eyes, "Do you know where it went? Can you pick it back up?"
No sooner had he spoken than Alice had already raised her hand, presenting a pitch-black small stone with a happy, triumphant look on her face, "For you, a stone!"
Although he had so suspicions, Duncan was still stunned for a few seconds when he saw how effortlessly the puppet produced the pebble—no one saw how Alice "picked" it back up, not even him!
It was as if the entire process had been skipped—"addressing," "pathway," and "arrival" all compressed into an unobservable sliver of ti, with only the "result" being output.
Sherry, who was standing by, finally couldn’t suppress her interjections, "...holy shit, that’s just fucking outrageous..."
A Dog seed to have gleaned sothing from the captain’s changing expression and turned its head in confusion, "Do you know how she did it?"
Duncan’s expression turned a bit grave, and after a brief hesitation, he nodded slightly, "...Alice’s other identity might be called ’LH-03.’"
A Dog was stunned and spoke in unison with Sherry, "...holy shit, that’s just fucking outrageous..."
"...We can discuss this matter later, and perhaps after eting The Saint, we may get more answers," Duncan waved his hand, not wanting to continue on this topic, instead focusing on Alice, "Can you lead us down to ’the bottom’?"
Alice tilted her head, then carefully made her way to the edge of the shattered land, leaning forward to look into the vast darkness below and the faintly twinkling "starlight," as if she was trying hard to think and observe sothing.
After a good while, she stepped back two steps and pointed into the great darkness outside the floating island, "Here, there are countless threads and ’paths,’ so of which connect to ’below,’ I think we can follow them down... but I don’t know how to take you with ."
As soon as she finished speaking, Duncan stepped forward, "Let see."
As he spoke, Duncan placed his hand on Alice’s shoulder, and at that mont, a phantom-like greenish glow appeared in Alice’s eyes—
A huge, intricate, almost fearsoly astonishing structure beca visible to Duncan.
He saw the world through the puppet’s eyes—at least, a part of it.
He saw endless, hair-like threads floating and drifting up from the bottom of the Mysterious Deep Sea, connecting up to the stagnant ancient skies, saw countless lines interweaving amongst the starry space, so rging downwards, others seeming to disappear into the depths of the cosmos, and he also saw hidden within the darkness outside the floating island... "tubular structures," crisscrossing, broken, endlessly changing, like so kind of uncontrollable "path" that could make one dizzy and disoriented at just a glance, completely indecipherable of any pattern, let alone its entirety.
Duncan frantically frowned; indeed, he saw the enormous structure of lines and pathways, but it was rely "seeing"—he could discern no pattern from it and could certainly not find the beginning or end of any one path within a short ti. This tangled ss in the Mysterious Deep Sea appeared to him as so sort of "encrypted data block," as incomprehensible as gibberish.
However, through the connection established by the flas, he could faintly sense Alice’s current state—she did not perceive any chaos in this massive trove of information before her.
In her eyes, everything was orderly—the chaotic pathways in the starry skies and the network of threads in the darkness that could drive the world’s scholars mad seed to her... as if at any mont, she could calculate the beginning and end of any path.
Even at that very mont, she was continually calculating—enormous computations were roaring ceaselessly in the depths of her mind, unnoticed even by herself.
Duncan blinked, and amidst the countless threads filling the whole Mysterious Deep Sea, he suddenly saw Alice turning her head, smiling faintly, without speaking, yet her voice directly reached his ears—
"Welco to the New Hope’s navigational database. It stores the gravitational characteristics and calibration paraters of billions of stars and can calculate the real-ti relative position changes of any celestial body in deep space to calibrate the star maps... We shall traverse the stars and reach our new ho at the end of light speed... We shall survive and rebuild the world of old...~*&"
The gentle female voice, reminiscent of a system broadcast, gradually beca distorted with static, and the off-tempo, delayed voice beca blurry before ceasing abruptly at an imperceptible mont.
Alice was still earnestly observing the dark space outside the floating island; she obviously hadn’t turned around or spoken.
Duncan raised his hand and dispersed the magical fla linkage he had with Alice.
The dizzying lines and tubular pathways in his field of vision disappeared in an instant.
Alice turned around with a happy smile, "You saw it, Captain, didn’t you? I wasn’t wrong, was I?"
"I saw it, but I’m afraid only you can carry out the ’navigation’ that follows," Duncan took a deep breath, looking at the doll intently, "Lead us down."
Alice hesitated for a mont before saying quickly, "But I don’t know how to lead people..."
"It’s okay, I know. We’ll follow you—you just have to trust your own judgnt and then walk forward without hesitation. Can you do that?"
Alice was visibly nervous in the face of the Captain’s unusually serious expression, but she finally nodded, her expression turning earnest as well: "Yes, I can!"
Duncan nodded slightly and then stepped back, spreading his hands open.
A pale green fla soared into the air, spiraling upward from the center of him and gradually spreading outwards, and then reached out towards the direction of Sherry, A-Gou, and Alice.
He recalled the experience of rging with Ai Yi and then softly reminded himself, "Sherry, relax, don’t be scared."
"I... I’m not scared!" Sherry’s voice imdiately ca from beside him, "It’s A-Gou who is scared!"
A-Gou’s entire body was shaking like it was on vibrate mode, his teeth chattering as he tried to assert himself, "Don’t... don’t talk nonsense, I... I’m relaxed, Captain he... he knows it!"
Duncan laughed and shook his head; within the rising flas, his gaze turned toward the doll in front: "Alice, let’s set off."
Alice nodded and then turned without hesitation, walking towards the boundless void beyond the floating island—
A bunch of burning pale green flas disappeared into the oncoming darkness.
At the sa ti, in the depths of the Holy Land Island in the real dinsion, both Lucracia and Morris heard an odd, low rumbling.
The sound seed to emanate from deep within the door, penetrating the surface that undulated slowly like rcury yet was dark as mud, and echoed repeatedly in the cave.
For a fleeting mont, Morris thought he heard a string of muffled words, of which he could only make out a few: "LH-03... reconnect..."
"Did you hear soone talking?" The old scholar imdiately snapped out of his daze, turning to look at the "witch of the Mysterious Deep Sea."
"No," Lucracia said at once, still intently watching the writhing black door, "But I feel like... sothing is about to co out of here."
Almost at the sa ti, Morris also sensed those sinister and frenzied presences, as so chaotic and rabid beings finally discovered the rift leading to the real dinsion and began to draw closer.
Morris had to put aside his confusion temporarily, and then he saw an entity erge from the writhing darkness—a twisted and bizarre Profound Demon struggled out of the gate, stepping into the real dinsion.
Lucracia raised the "conductor’s baton" in her hand, transforming it into a scythe shimring with a cold black gleam, while Morris, upon seeing the form of the demon, paused abruptly.
It was his first encounter with a demon invading the real dinsion looking like this.
After a mont of stunned silence, he and Lucracia looked at each other.
"...How co this Harbinger bird has only one leg?"
"I don’t know... Let’s kill it first, then ask questions."
"Yeah, makes sense."
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