Deep Sea Embers - Chapter 563: Revisiting the Garden

As was her usual disposition, Alice demonstrated an unwavering trust in Captain Duncan’s judgment. She didn’t question or doubt him when he suddenly expressed the desire to use a particular key once more. With a cheerful demeanor, she instantly agreed to his request, her faith in him unshaken.

Taking the opportunity to clarify his intentions, Duncan explained to Alice, “I need to re-enter the Alice Mansion to test some theories I’ve been developing about a place or time referred to as the ‘Old World.’”

Alice responded with an enthusiastic nod. Although the term “Old World” was unclear to her, she grasped the seriousness of the matter. She was keenly aware that whatever Duncan was planning, it was of utmost importance.

With a sense of familiarity bred from their previous collaborations, Alice swiftly located a stable and comfortable spot to sit down. She then turned around to expose the keyhole situated on her back.

“As a matter of fact, I’ve been talking to Nina about possibly altering my dress, maybe cutting an opening right where the keyhole is,” she chatted animatedly as she waited for Duncan to wind her up with the key. “But she had reservations, thinking that sand or dust might find its way in. I find her concerns a bit exaggerated. After all, it’s not like I’m rolling around on the ground; how would anything get in there?”

“Better to err on the side of caution,” Duncan advised in a laid-back tone. “We can’t be certain how sensitive or fragile the internal mechanism might be. If it were to malfunction due to debris, I’m not equipped to repair it.”

Alice kept up her chatter, adding, “Well, Miss Lucretia might have the skills to fix it. She was able to repair Luni, remember? But yes, you have a point, Captain. Repairing Luni’s head took quite a bit of time.”

Listening to Alice discuss subjects that would sound downright surreal to an outsider, Duncan couldn’t help but break a smile. He picked up the unique brass key that had been the subject of their conversation. As he had done previously, he gently and carefully inserted it into Alice’s keyhole.

As the key turned automatically, a familiar clicking sound reverberated through the air. Duncan braced himself. Within a second, his sensory perception underwent a dramatic change; his focus shifted and his orientation reconfigured.

A few moments later, he opened his eyes, initially enveloped in total darkness. He allowed his senses some time to adapt to this new reality. When his eyes finally adjusted, the strange garden, framed by a sky that seemed straight out of a cartoon and an abundance of verdant greenery, materialized in front of him once more.

Stationed at the garden’s center, surrounded by entangled vines and bristling thorny bushes, was a silver-haired gothic humanoid doll identical to Alice. The doll’s sketchpad lay beside her, untouched and in the exact same position as it had been during his last visit.

Taking a moment to cautiously scan his environment and mentally compare it to his previous experiences, Duncan remained still before finally allowing himself to move.

About thirty seconds later, Duncan had finished surveying the environment around him and found no irregularities. Everything appeared as he had left it, untouched and unaltered. A curious sensation washed over him, leading him to suspect that time in this so-called “Alice Mansion” had come to a standstill in his absence, resuming only upon his reentry.

The notion was unsettling, yet it didn’t feel entirely baseless.

He found himself reflecting on an encounter with a rather peculiar entity in the mansion—a headless butler—who had once informed him of the Alice Mansion’s unique rules governing the passage of time.

After mulling this over briefly, Duncan lifted his eyes to examine the sky that stretched over the bizarre garden setting.

During his last visit, his senses had been overwhelmed by the mansion’s myriad of surreal and unsettling phenomena. Questions had bombarded his mind so quickly that he couldn’t focus on any single aspect of his surroundings. Although the sky—cartoonish and peculiar—had caught his eye back then, he had never taken the opportunity to scrutinize its details.

Today, he looked up with a newfound sense of urgency and determination.

Above him, clouds resembling doodles made with a child’s crayon set drifted lazily across a sky painted a light shade of blue. Exaggerated rays of sunshine extended from behind the clouds, and a sun seemingly daubed with golden-yellow paint illuminated the area below, providing both warmth and light to the verdant garden.

The sky had a whimsical, almost childlike allure, but it was tinged with an undercurrent of unsettling strangeness.

Narrowing his eyes, Duncan turned his attention to the golden-yellow sun and was struck by a realization he had previously missed: the sun had no surrounding ring of runes.

“No wonder something felt off last time, but I couldn’t pinpoint what it was,” Duncan mumbled to himself, his face betraying a subtle change in expression. The disconcerting element of the sky he had sensed during his previous visit became glaringly apparent: the sun was a depiction of what he knew a sun should be—albeit cartoonishly abstract and crudely drawn—but it was a “normal” sun nonetheless.

His oversight now seemed almost glaring. If residents of his world, such as Morris or Vanna, had been there, they likely would have sensed the oddity immediately.

Duncan’s eyebrows began to knit together in deeper thought. The presence of a “normal sun” in this sky suggested that the Alice Mansion was giving away more of its hidden truths than he had first surmised.

In his native world, a world submerged in a vast ocean, the sun is an artificial celestial body surrounded by two concentric rings of runes. This has been an unquestioned truth for ten millennia since the start of the Deep Sea Age. No one actually knows what a “true sun” would look like. Even the Suntists, who claim to worship the real Black Sun, portray it as a fearsome and nightmarish ancient deity in their teachings.

This lack of a runic circle around the sun suggested that the Alice Mansion was hinting at secrets far more profound and unsettling than Duncan had originally anticipated. It was as if he was piecing together a puzzle that called into question the very foundational truths he had always taken for granted about the reality of his world.

Who could have possibly imprinted this concept of a “normal sun” or even an “original sun” within the surreal Alice Mansion?

Duncan’s mind raced with theories and connections. He knew that the puppet “Alice” had come into existence after the Frost Queen, Ray Nora, had plunged into the deep sea. Why then would the Alice Mansion—intimately tied to Alice and thereby to Ray Nora—feature a depiction of a sun that seemingly belonged to an epoch predating the Great Annihilation?

If one were to lend credence to the “World Aggregation Theory” concerning the Great Annihilation—that the era known as the Deep Sea Age was molded from the aggregation and transmutation of several old worlds—then where did this “original sun” fit in? Was it a celestial body from a specific ancient world, or was it merely an abstract symbol without direct backgrounds?

An odd mental image surfaced in Duncan’s thoughts then—a rather chubby dove. He shook his head in mild confusion, taking a moment to sift through the flood of complex information that deluged his mind.

Another puzzle piece had emerged in his thoughts: the actual birth of Alice.

Yes, her appearance was modeled after the Frost Queen, Ray Nora, but her fundamental construct was also a flawed duplicate of another entity known as the “Alice Guillotine.” This made Duncan consider the motivations and methodologies of Anomaly 099’s creators. Clearly, the original subject of duplication didn’t matter to them—be it a powerful human or a mere chunk of wood, they were all just raw materials. What mattered was the creator’s intent and capability.

An “erroneous duplicate” of someone referred to as the Nether Lord was behind the creation of Anomaly 099.

Could it then be posited that this mysterious Alice Mansion was also a construct of this flawed duplication of the Nether Lord? Extrapolating from this idea, it was conceivable that this duplicate might still contain a substantial repository of knowledge from its original version. Could some elements within the Alice Mansion be clues pointing back to an “Ancient God” residing in what is known as the Boundless Sea?

His eyes returned to the sky, scanning the childishly drawn sun, the crayon-like clouds, and the exaggerated sunbeams. Were these elements inadvertent slivers of the Nether Lord’s residual memories, or were they intentionally left as cryptic fragments of some greater truth?

The more he pondered these possibilities, the more plausible they seemed. One thing appeared certain: the actual nature of the “original sun” could only exist in a temporal point before the Great Annihilation. The mysteries concealed within the Alice Mansion must also link back to that ancient period.

Given the facts and theories currently at his disposal, it appeared that only the enigmatic entities known as the Four Gods—or perhaps those even more elusive and unsettling “Ancient Gods” from deeper layers of reality—could potentially have insights into the world prior to the Great Annihilation.

An idea seized him abruptly. He glanced down at the sketchpad clutched in the puppet’s hands. Could this seemingly insignificant artifact be a key to unlocking not just the puzzles of the Alice Mansion, but of ancient worlds and perhaps even the Ancient Gods themselves?

It was becoming increasingly evident that the Alice Mansion wasn’t just a localized mystery, but rather a piece in an incomprehensibly vast cosmic jigsaw puzzle that awaited completion.

After hesitating for a brief moment, Duncan carefully crouched down, cautiously maneuvering around the thorny underbrush that surrounded him. With deliberate precision, he extracted the sketchpad from the puppet’s unresisting hands.

The cover of the sketchpad depicted an unsettling vortex, twisted stars, and a menacing red hue that seemed to ooze malevolence. On the back cover, however, was an engraved inscription that Duncan found strangely familiar:

“…The messenger brings news from afar, the chosen clan has picked up the lost ancient star and forged it into a blessed crown—The Third Long Night has ended.”

His eyes settled on these words, mulling over their weight and meaning.

These lines described the actions of the ancient Crete Clan who, guided by an entity known as the “King of Darkness,” had constructed Vision 001 and raised it to the heavens.

When Duncan first encountered this text in the garden, it was nothing but cryptic and meaningless to him. But now, after absorbing what he’d seen and experienced, he was hit with an unanticipated realization.

His thoughts veered toward the fallen ten-meter-diameter “moon”—which he understood was a fragment, a “component” that had detached from the rune circle of Vision 001.

In Duncan’s mind, the rune circle encapsulating the sun resembled an illustrious “crown,” and the deformed, compressed “moon” seemed to perfectly fit the description of a “lost ancient star.”

Just as he was engrossed in this intricate web of thoughts, a soft, indistinct noise reverberated from somewhere deep within the garden, snapping him back to his immediate surroundings.

Duncan’s head shot up, his eyes darting towards the direction from which the noise had originated.

Before him was nothing but dense vegetation. The shadows cast by thriving shrubs and dwarf trees gave way to a more profound darkness that lay beyond.

But Duncan was certain he had not imagined the sound.

According to the headless butler, this was the innermost part of the Alice Mansion, a place where even the mansion’s high-ranking servants weren’t allowed to tread casually. Only Mistress Alice and a mysterious entity known as the “Gardener” had access. Yet, the “Gardener” had been absent for an indeterminate amount of time.

Could there be an intruder? Or had the long-absent “Gardener” finally returned?

With his brows tightly knitted, Duncan carefully returned the sketchpad to the puppet’s arms. With stealthy steps, he began to move cautiously towards the luxuriant, shadow-cloaked shrubbery.

“Rustle… swish… rustle…” The faint noises manifested again, emanating from an undefined, obscured location.

Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he saw it. A shape resembling a sinuous, unsettling tentacle was surreptitiously wriggling and weaving its way through the inky darkness at the garden’s periphery.