Chapter 1279 - 1278: "Cruising

Chapter 1279: Chapter 1278: "Cruising

The "Steel Ground" did not respond to Gawain’s Voyager signal. This hollow shell ran according to preset procedures, just like an old timetable: after pausing for a moment at the Border of the Divine Kingdom, it began to withdraw once more into the Depths of Chaos in the darkness—the body of this monster echoed with a low growl from ancient engines or some other kind of propulsion device, the half‑transparent energy shields became more solid and heavy than before, boundless clouds of dust and sand gathered from all directions, and as the "starship" slowly sank and retreated, those surging sands began to close together above everyone’s heads.

Melita Ponia raised her head and looked toward War God’s Divine Realm. That dead city shrouded in twilight radiance floated above a sea of clouds that was constantly disintegrating. Nuoletta and the others still stood at the border, watching this side, while the dust and mist had already gathered from all around, distant faces becoming blurred in the haze—she waved hard, and the silhouettes far away waved in return. Then the sky‑filling cloud‑sea flooded everyone’s field of view.

"We’re beginning to ’sink’," Gawain said in a low voice. He lifted his head, watching that layer of dim yellow haze outside the barrier grow ever thicker, while the surrounding light likewise dimmed further and further. "Next we’ll lose contact with the world we’re familiar with and enter a domain that no mortal has ever visited—be extra careful."

"From the moment we stepped into War God’s Divine Realm, we had already entered a domain mortals have never visited." Daniel shook his head slightly as he spoke in a deep voice. Standing behind him, Mary clutched her short Magic Wand tightly. She looked a bit nervous, yet also faintly filled with expectation and excitement toward the unknown.

Gawain couldn’t help but look at this young female Mage a moment longer, then nodded slightly.

As Daniel’s mental state grew ever better, this girl—who had once been timid and hesitant, living every day in fear—had now undergone great changes... even she herself was probably not aware of it.

The "light from the heavens" above was growing ever dimmer. As this steel megaship sank further into the depths, that thick cloud‑sea, formed from a great mass of dust and fog, turned darker and darker, like the night sky—and as the darkness outside the barrier grew more intense, certain Automatic Systems on the "Steel Ground" activated, and more lights appeared in the sight of Gawain and the others.

These light‑orbs hovering in midair like streetlamps were distributed along both sides of the road cast from some unknown alloy. They could not make this place bright as day, yet they were enough for one to see clearly the surroundings.

"There must once have been people here," Modir said thoughtfully as he watched those lights automatically turn on with the darkening "sky." "Machines don’t need such streetlamps; only people do."

"We’ve left that ’cloud‑sea.’" Victoria Wilder suddenly lifted her head and glanced up, her gaze catching the change of scenery beyond the barrier—although it was already dark outside as though under the night sky, the powerful vision of a Transcendent could still distinguish those faint "landscapes" in the darkness. She saw a billowing bank of cloud‑mist rapidly receding beyond the barrier, with dim yellow gleams, almost impossible to discern with the naked eye, deep within it. That was War God’s Divine Realm and the "Divine Kingdom Dissipation Zone" swiftly drawing away. And beyond those indistinct cloud‑masses, boundless darkness and chaos had already surged in from every direction.

The steel megaship left by the Voyagers was falling into the deep-sea—and still sinking further.

"We’ve already left the material world now, right?" Amber looked somewhat nervous at what lay beyond the barrier, hugging her arms as she muttered in a low voice, "Why do I feel a little cold... Can this barrier really maintain an environment suitable for living?"

"The surrounding temperature hasn’t changed; you’re just scaring yourself," Gawain cast a glance at this cowardly "shame of the alliance." "As for the material world... I’m increasingly unsure what counts as the material world, and what counts as the elemental or spiritual world."

He furrowed his brow, his gaze fixed on that endless, unfathomable darkness beyond the barrier—and within that darkness, it was as though countless geometric lines floated, countless chaotic substances or ’patches’ indescribable in words: "Do you see those things? Those ’entities’ that look like they’re floating in the dark—we just passed through one particularly enormous ’mass,’ and yet this ’ship’ beneath our feet didn’t seem to interact with it at all, as if passing through a shadow... But according to the Goddess of Magic, those ’objects’ drifting in the darkness ought to be ’entities’ that can be touched..."

Amber’s eyes instantly widened. "Ship? You’re saying this thing under our feet is a ship?"

"I can’t think of a more suitable term—’Steel Ground’ only describes its upper layer, while the overall structure and operating pattern of this thing clearly isn’t that of an island. It’s some kind of... ’voyaging implement’ left by the Voyagers, so I believe it’s a ship—though the scale of this ship is a bit large, large beyond our imagination."

Gawain spoke slowly as he led everyone forward along the steel road underfoot, walking toward its distant end while sensing the flow of energy around them, all the while continuously attempting to call out to any possible remaining "Voyager System" aboard.

"Such a colossal... ’ship’..." The young female Mage Mary swallowed, looking with a hint of reverence at the alloy deck stretching endlessly into the distance and the ancient facilities built upon it. This girl from the countryside, after adapting to life in the imperial capital, had once thought that she too had broadened her horizons; even if not as erudite as her mentor, she at least counted as a qualified Mage. Yet only now did she suddenly realize that beyond the bounds of her understanding, there existed so many unimaginable things in this world.

Melita Ponia heard Mary’s soft exclamation; she only smiled faintly and glanced at the girl. "The Voyagers can build things even larger—large to the point that even we dragons feel they’re beyond imagination."

Gawain smiled, shaking his head without speaking. Indeed, the colossal creations of the Voyagers truly defied imagination... Have you ever seen an Orbital Ring Space Station circling the entire planet?

A vast shadow suddenly emerged from the darkness, appearing above the barrier of the Steel Ground with a silent pressure. It looked like a pitch‑black segment of cylinder—though seeing another pitch‑black object in the dark sounded somewhat bizarre, Gawain and his companions could indeed clearly perceive the outline and trajectory of this "chaotic mass." It drifted out from the depths of the dark, rotating as it passed right through the "megaship" beneath their feet, without bringing the slightest tremor or creating any ripple in the darkness.

"Once again... we’ve brushed past such an ’entity’ in the chaos," Kamel said in a deep voice. The twin points of light where his head should be flickered faintly, showing that he had sunk into thought. "It seems this ’ship’ beneath us uses some unknown technology to prevent itself from interacting with the ’entities’ in the chaos... Unbelievable—how is this done?"

No one could answer Kamel’s question; not even Melita Ponia, a dragon, could. Yet Gawain suddenly recalled once more the things the Goddess of Magic had mentioned in her reports to him—those matters concerning the blurred border between the material and the immaterial, the mutual transformation of spirit and entity. He still could not fathom the mysteries behind it all, but vaguely, he felt that the many strange phenomena unfolding at the "bottom layer of the world" must be connected in some way to what the Goddess of Magic had witnessed.

The Voyagers of one million eight hundred thousand years ago... must already have grasped these secrets and converted them into controllable technology. This giant vessel capable of voyaging through the deep-sea was likely one such application.

"So what exactly are those ’objects’ floating in the dark?" Amber tilted her head back, staring curiously at the chaotic clumps that kept drifting past outside the barrier, ceaselessly surfacing and vanishing in the darkness. "They don’t look like the kind of wreckage floating outside the kingdom—those fragments may be bizarrely shaped, but you can still basically make out their colors and original forms. But these black geometric bodies... some of them even feel as though they don’t fit..."

Amber frowned, stumbling over her words as she tried to go on, but Gawain already knew what she wanted to say, and casually picked up the sentence: "Don’t fit geometric common sense... shouldn’t exist in the real world, right?"

"The senior advisors of the theocracy Authority Council don’t have a unified view on the nature of these things either," Kamel said in a low voice from the side. "They speculate that these ’chaotic drifters’ might be thought-fragments from an even more ancient age, their history completely drowned in the river of time. Even the oldest Dragon God no longer knows their origin. In a long process of forgetting and mutation, the echoes of the primordial era turned into these formless things that drift in the deep-sea... But another hypothesis holds that these things aren’t all that ancient—that they are also part of the mindscape projections of this era, only their projection logic doesn’t conform to any rules we currently know..."

"...We still know far too little about the bizarre existences here," Gawain sighed softly, then looked to Kamel. "Can you locate that Explorer Golem we sent here earlier?"

"Yes. It’s in standby mode, but it has been continuously emitting a faint Magic Power signal outward. I can sense it beneath a passageway ahead," Kamel nodded as he spoke. "I memorized the route map it sent back. There’s a path that leads into the interior of this ’ship’... though judging from the ’depth’, it’s still far from reaching the true ’core’ of the vessel."

Gawain nodded, signaling Kamel to take the lead, and the entire scouting teams continued deeper into this expanse of "Steel Ground".

At the same time, this ancient starship—which may have been running for one point eight million years, bearing some mysterious mission—continued to ’sail’ in this boundless chaotic space. There was no effective reference in sight; no one knew how fast this ’ship’ flew, how deep it dove. Only those strange, disorderly shadows ceaselessly sweeping past beyond the barrier served to remind everyone that the "continent" beneath their feet was not fixed in place, but in a constant state of voyage.

Just then, a faint tremor suddenly rose from beneath their feet. The scouting teams, who had been heading toward a passage entrance, immediately halted.

Amber looked around nervously, her mouth running in a rapid whisper: "What’s happening, what’s happening..."

Kamel raised a hand and traced a few simple magic symbols in midair. A moment later, he spoke quietly: "...We’re decelerating, and... ’ascending’."

Before he finished speaking, a very hazy glimmer abruptly appeared diagonally above this "Steel Ground". In the endless Dark Chaos, that thread of light was conspicuously striking, startlingly sudden!

Everyone instantly grew more alert, ready to face some unnameable horror that might lunge out from the darkness. Gawain fixed his gaze on that nebulous glow, faint conjectures stirring in his heart. As the light drew closer, fragments of wreckage orbiting around it gradually swam out of the dark, and the vague guess in his mind slowly took shape.

The colossal "starship" carrying them all began to "ascend" toward that glow, while deftly avoiding the debris fragments circling around the light—or perhaps it was those fragments, or the "echoes" still lingering in them, that perceived some extreme danger and shifted away in advance from the vessel’s rising trajectory. After only a short while, the scenery within that hazy glow gradually came into focus, and as they finally saw what it was, everyone’s eyes slowly widened.

It was a stretch of land, a fertile soil, a luxuriant garden floating in the depths of darkness and chaos. A membrane of light wrapped a space shaped like a bubble; within, it was eternally spring, flowers in riotous bloom. Innumerable strange and precious fruits hung heavy upon the branches, their weight bending the limbs of sacred trees. Rich, black earth rolled in gentle contours, carpeted with all the blossoms of the mortal world. Two great rivers passed through the fertile terrain and flowed into a vast garden; honey and fine wine ran in those rivers, glimmering with a pale golden sheen under the sky.

And in that garden, by the banks of the rivers, wondrous winged beings shaped like tiny elves were busily preparing delicacies and exquisite ornaments. They carried what they had finished to a long table at the heart of the garden. That table was extraordinarily broad, surrounded by guests bursting with laughter—and at the far end of the table sat three beautiful figures. Their lower bodies were like those of deer, while their upper bodies were perfectly formed women. They wore garlands woven of flowers and leaves, and long golden hair cascaded like waterfalls down their fronts.

They... or rather "They", were entertaining the guests at the long table. The feast seemed only just begun, yet also as though it had already lasted for ten millennia.

The archaic starship sailing through Dark Chaos gradually drew close to that "paradise" floating in the void. Countless detector devices activated in silence, and several beams of light swept across the surface of that thin light-membrane. Yet the Holy Spirits reveling in the garden paid all this no heed.

"That is..." Amber raised her head and pointed at the "garden" floating outside the barrier in an inverted posture, gaping at the view within, utterly dumbstruck.

By now, the "Steel Ground" had come extremely close to that "paradise", even closer than when they had hovered on the Border of the Divine Kingdom of the War God. With the eyesight of the scouting teams, they could clearly see the banquet underway in that garden.

"...The Divine Kingdom of the three goddesses of fertility," Gawain said in a low voice. "Obviously, this is the new ’stop’."

As his words fell, Modir blinked at his side, seemingly about to say something—but at that moment, fresh upheaval struck!

He saw the barrier overhead suddenly flicker, and an additional, pale-blue great barrier unfolded upon it. Outside this newly risen barrier, the "Fertility Divine Kingdom" floating in Dark Chaos instantly transformed!

The "sunlight" that had bathed the fertile soil turned into a wan, murky, blood-red dying sun. The rich land was coated in a layer of decayed, rotting mire; what grew from the earth were rusted scythes and twisted, ferocious branches. Filthy blood coursed through the great rivers, surging to flood the dying, withered garden. Bloated, putrefying monsters continually fished grotesque severed limbs and rancid flesh from the blood-rivers, bearing them to the long table bristling with thorns. On either side of that table, gaunt, elongated creatures thronged together, ravenous and mad as they tore into the flesh piled upon the boards—even ripping at their own shriveled limbs. And at the far end of the table, three warped, hideous figures watched in silence over a feast that had already lasted ten thousand years. The flower garlands upon Them had become thorny crowns, green vines had become chains bursting through bone. Those chains stretched into the infinite distance, as though drawn all the way to the very brink of the kingdom. Rancid blood streamed ceaselessly from Their chain-pierced bodies, dripping down to join the garden’s blood-river below!