Hearing the captain’s orders, Alice imdiately began to think very seriously—then looked even more seriously into Duncan’s eyes: "What is an escape pod?"
Duncan wasn’t surprised by this at all, he would actually start to worry the day this doll lady stopped malfunctioning—however, the situation at hand isn’t too problematic, because after several incidents, he had confird that "Alice" might be clueless about many things, but the operational state of "Navigation System Three" was actually still pretty much online, and that old yet powerful spatial navigation system... was within Alice’s "instincts".
Now all that was needed was to make Alice’s "instinct" realize that a part of this mansion was missing—theoretically, that is.
"It’s a part that’s missing from this ’Alice’s Mansion’, but you don’t have to understand exactly what it is," seeing the doll still staring at him curiously with wide eyes, Duncan said casually, "Do you rember what I told you about the Frost Queen?"
Alice thought for a while: "Which one? There are many, but I don’t seem to rember all of them..."
"Lei Nora took a room from your ’mansion’, that room, is what I call the escape pod, and now she has ’ridden’ the escape pod to the ashen lands at the edge of the world. I need to pinpoint her location," Duncan explained patiently, "It’s okay if you don’t understand now, I will try to guide you through the process of ’understanding’ it."
Alice listened as if she understood, but still nodded quickly after the captain finished speaking: "Oh, what do I need to do now?"
"You stay here, keep sitting under this ’tree’, just like you did when you analyzed the external barrier’s navigation route, maintain the ’connection’ with this mansion," as Duncan spoke, he lifted his right hand, and a cluster of soft green fla, imbued with starlight, quietly burned in his palm, he handed this fla to the doll before him, "Take this, it will establish an additional ’bridge’ between you and , I’m going to the ’damaged’ part of the mansion to make markings. If things are as I predict, I should be able to ’intervene’ in the operation of Navigation System Three through this thod, bridging externally to transfer data into your ’system core’."
Alice uttered "oh", imdiately nodded happily and agreed: "Mhm, okay!"
As she spoke, she reached out without hesitation to grasp the cluster of fla handed to her by the captain—a strange warmth touched her palm, the ethereal fla seemingly gaining tangibility, gently swaying in her hand.
Alice carefully cradled the small fla, with her other hand clutching her "tablet", turned around and returned to the side of the "Data Tree" woven from countless cables and pipes, and sat down on the platform, lifting her head with a radiant smile: "I’m ready!"
Duncan smiled and nodded his head, then turned and left the hall—he passed through the ornate door that originally connected the garden and the depths of the mansion, through the long corridor filled with many locked rooms and the humming of servers, past staircases and halls, and soon ca to the deepest end of the corridor on the second floor: the "rupture point" between the escape pod and the main body of the ship.
At the end of the corridor, everything was still in the sa state as when he left last ti, the floor, ceiling, and walls as if torn apart by an invisible colossal force, appeared fragnted and broken, outside the rupture point was the endlessly deep dark space, so deep it seed as if one glance could make a person "fall" in.
Duncan ignored the darkness outside the rupture and ca with a clear goal in front of a certain part of the wall on the side of the corridor, soon, he found what he was looking for near that rupture point.
It was a display screen "lted" into the wall, which was still cycling through warnings about the escape pod being released illegally.
"...Now to verify my hypothesis..." Duncan stood in front of the display screen, took a light breath, and slowly closed his eyes, "Let’s ’see’... the true appearance of this place."
A thread of profound starlight seeped out from the slits of his half-closed eyes—he cautiously controlled his increasingly restless "essence", understood his own power, and tried, without fully unleashing the Reverse Singularity, to open his... "other pair of eyes".
Duncan slowly opened Zhou Ming’s eyes.
Starlight burst forth from those eyes, as if ancient stars at this mont suddenly rembered how to revolve, and where the starlight spread, he saw... the other side of Alice’s Mansion.
The astonishingly large ark spaceship floated in the limitless dark chaos of space, the torn starship had almost only a third of its structure left, and he stood at the end of a connecting corridor in the middle of the ship, where the silver-gray and silver-white alloy structure replaced the dark toned floor and walls of the original mansion corridor, various warning lights flickered in the distance, and before his eyes, was the burnt, lted support fra of the escape pod.
A huge hole had been blown open at the front of the escape pod’s release point, looking quite alarming.
"...Lei Nora definitely didn’t leave ’quietly’ as she claid at that ti," Duncan gave the broken pipelines, support fras and the spaceship’s exterior shell that was blasted open only a glance before his lips twitched, "...how did she blow this place open without having any idea what was going on here?"
Of course, nobody in the empty spaceship corridor could answer his questions, after all, the only "owner" and "victim" of this place still didn’t know what an escape pod was—Duncan sighed and just shook his head, then turned his attention back to the flickering display screen.
Now, he had seen the full picture of the device—it was part of the escape pod’s external release system, fixed onto a bent support fra, the entire fra was badly twisted and damaged, its internal piping was even exposed, but it seed to still be operating normally.
Duncan placed his hand on the device, ready to "read" the data here with his own fla and transfer it to Alice’s side—that was his thought, simple and unrefined.
Alice’s current state was unable to understand the "essence" of her mansion, thus she also couldn’t sense the system malfunction here, the instincts of the "Navigation System Three" were still there but unreactive since Alice couldn’t read the signal, so Duncan’s task was to weld a jumper wire between Alice and the "fault point" of this mansion.
He certainly didn’t understand the principles behind the spaceship—just as most phone repair technicians don’t know the specific internal structure of a chip, as long as bridging wires were soldered on and it worked, that’s all that mattered.
The technique of bridging wires was awe-inspiring.
The flas burned quietly, gradually infiltrating the escape pod’s release system.
Just then, out of the corner of his eye, Duncan suddenly caught sight of sothing.
A mass... with a dark grey tallic sheen and undulating like mud, seemingly flowing out from the grates and pipes of the surrounding equipnt!
That eerie mass of mud-like substance piled up and flowed on the floor, slowly moving towards him, emitting a bone-chilling, low noise. Yet, just as Duncan was raising his guard, ready to react, the mud suddenly stopped not far away, as if observing or judging sothing.
Duncan paused for a mont, then it dawned on him—
It was the "Cleaner" from Alice’s Mansion! That bizarre shadow used to expel "invading foreign substances"!
...Is this thing a part of the New Hope’s maintenance system? So kind of damage control device? A swarm of nanomachines?
While maintaining the data intrusion into the escape pod system, Duncan’s mind was racing with thoughts, and just then, he saw the "nanomud" crawl a few steps closer to him.
No hostility whatsoever.
Under Duncan’s cautious gaze, the nanomachine swarm slowly differentiated into an appendage resembling a tentacle, which tapped the release system’s bent support strut as if to demonstrate sothing to Duncan, pulling a damaged cable out of the strut.
Duncan’s expression was peculiar: "...You an, connect it here?"
The mud differentiated another limb, swinging it up and down in the air.
Duncan hesitated, then allowed his flas to spread to the damaged cable.
The mud seed pleased, shaking its two limbs and then reverting to a liquid state. It gurgled as it slowly made its way towards a crack in the nearby wall.
Duncan: "..."
This thing can actually communicate and think?!
While he was still in a daze, the mud had completely left, and right after, he heard Alice’s voice coming through the psychic link: "Captain! The board is lit up! The board is lit up! I think I’ve figured out where that ’escape pod’ is!"
...
"There are one hundred and seventy-six people here—everyone who has ’awakened’ is here," Helena, accompanied by Fenna and Lucresia, walked through the central connecting bridge of the residential area, continuing as they moved, "This was originally part of the power plant at the port. As more and more people ’awoke,’ those who were initially awake and in good condition spontaneously gathered here and built a camp."
Fenna stopped on the connecting bridge, leaning on the railing and looking down at the temporary residential area established using the existing infrastructure of the power plant.
The Female Pope’s voice, after a brief pause, continued: "We’ll soon expand into a better living area—the dormitories next to the power plant. They’re currently occupied by ’confused compatriots’. We can’t expel them by force, and we should avoid conflict as much as possible, but as more and more people in that district awaken, we’ll be able to move our main activity area there once the majority is awake."
"It’s hard to imagine," Lucresia couldn’t help but speak after a mont of silence, "the world has actually turned into this..."
"Better adapt quickly. The current City-State is just this place magnified a thousand tis over," Helena said softly. The Female Pope, incarnated and personally stationed at this beacon, turned her head to look at Fenna and Lucresia, "As for now... it’s your turn, tell about the matters at the end of the world."
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