Chapter 1289: Chapter 1288: Spaceship Wreckage

With Amber’s slap, the grey‑white dust that had been constantly rising and dissipating from Modir’s body was immediately brought under control in a way visible to the naked eye, rapidly gathering and flowing back into the old Mage’s body. Yet Amber’s expression didn’t relax at all; instead, she looked even more severe and tense than before—she withdrew her hand and stared at Modir for quite a long time before finally breaking the silence: "This probably can only hold for a while..."

"I know." Modir gave a complicated smile, raising his hands before his eyes to look at them. "I can feel it... as a part of the memories in my mind ’loosen’, I finally sense it... Amber, am I already dead?"

Amber opened her mouth. Even with her usually carefree, boisterous temperament, for a moment she didn’t know how to answer such a blunt question. But Gawain walked over at this moment, patted Amber’s shoulder to have her step aside for now, then looked into Modir’s eyes: "I won’t hide it from you... judging by the normal form of a mortal life, it’s impossible for you to still be alive. Your body and soul are both down to barely half, but there is a power keeping your life force going..."

"Lady Night?" Modir frowned slightly, speaking with a thoughtful look. "The Goddess I saw in those ’dreams’?"

Gawain and Amber nodded at the same time, and Modir smiled in relief: "Oh, that’s not hard to guess."

"I’ve got to remind you again," seeing such a calm smile on the old Mage’s face, Amber instead grew even more nervous than him, "your situation right now is really bad. The underlying principles aren’t clear, but your state of memory is obviously tightly bound to both your soul and your body. Now you’ve recalled things that in theory you weren’t supposed to remember, and that’s made the Shadow Sand Dust sustaining half your body extremely unstable—they’re trying to return to Lady of Night’s Divine Kingdom. Your current life is literally relying on these grains of shadow to persist; once the sand leaves, you’ll be..."

"How long can I live?" Modir cut her off, asking with a calm face.

"...Hard to say." Amber spoke frankly. "If I weren’t helping you stabilize things for the moment, you’d be hitting your limit in roughly ten days to half a month. But even with me temporarily stabilizing your condition, at most you can last another year or two—let me be straight with you: the Shadow Sand Dust in you comes directly from the Kingdom of Shadows, completely different from the ’knockoff’ kind I summon. I can exercise a bit of control over it, but only ’a bit of control’. Now these grains are dead‑set on going back ’to the other side’; the fact that I can stall them at all is already remarkable."

"...A year or two..." Modir listened fixedly as Amber laid out the cold facts, and in the end he couldn’t keep a trace of regret from surfacing on his face. "To be honest, it is a bit sudden—but I believe you’ve done your best, Amber. This remaining time, you could say it’s not much, but it’s not little either. I need to plan it carefully... plan it carefully."

"Ancestor, you..." Standing to the side, Victoria Wilder finally couldn’t help taking a step forward, seemingly wanting to support the elderly man before her who still looked so frail. Yet Modir raised his hand to stop her first, then turned toward the floral vine in the wooden cabin. The old Mage stared at it for a long time before finally breaking the silence in a soft voice: "I’m sorry... I failed your expectations."

The small cabin fell silent for a time, but just then Gawain suddenly recalled the intelligence Amber had brought back from Lady of Night’s Divine Kingdom earlier. He thought of that mysterious book titled "Wilder" and its pages filled from top to bottom with the repeated warning "Beware the sentinel towers." Something stirred in his heart, and he faintly grasped a critical thread: "No, Modir. While things may have deviated from the original plan, the warning entrusted to you by the Elven Twins might not have been completely wasted. It didn’t reach the eyes of the masses, but it may have reached another crucial ’person’."

"Another crucial ’person’?" Kamel asked curiously at the side. "You mean..."

"I’ve been thinking about this since just now: the sentinel towers have been out of control for a thousand years, and the Inversion Tide’s contamination has been spreading among the Voyager legacy since even earlier. This dangerous power has had all that time to slowly scheme at destroying our world—yet our world still survives to this day... After entering the real world, that runaway sentinel tower went dormant for an extremely long time before slowly beginning its activities. Don’t you find that abnormal?" Gawain spoke in a low voice as he pondered aloud. "Within all this, there is a very critical period of time—that stretch from six hundred years ago, when Modir entered the Tower of the Inversion Tide, until his disappearance..."

Amber slowly caught up: "In that time, the Inversion Tide’s true body broke free from the tower’s control. Modir met the Elven Twins trapped in the ’Sentinel Base’. Then, by a twist of fate, the Elven Twins’ warning ended up with Lady Night, while the Inversion Tide’s main body never once entered the real world—based on the information we currently have, it seems to be assaulting Lady Night’s throne..."

"Yes. That monster, likely the Inversion Tide’s true body, is attacking Lady Night’s throne. In that case, there may be another explanation... in fact, it is also trapped there." Gawain met Amber’s eyes, feeling as if more and more of some formerly blurred clues were gradually becoming clear. "The sentinel towers contaminated by the Inversion Tide, and the Inversion Tide’s true body—if both were to invade our reality at the same time, the consequences would be unimaginable. That might be the true beginning of the catastrophe, and I think that was very likely what the sentinel tower wanted to do at the outset—

"After it broke free of its mission directives, the first thing it probably did was release the ’Inversion Tide’ sealed by the tower. Considering it was already contaminated by the Inversion Tide, that possibility is extremely high. This also explains what’s going on with the Deep Blue Rift in that northern tower, and its goal was very likely to join up with the Inversion Tide’s true body in the real world... but that plan clearly never succeeded."

"But this is all your conjecture." Amber suddenly spoke from the side.

The goose’s eyes were oddly sharp at this moment.

"It’s a deduction," Gawain said in a deep voice. "The Elven Twins’ warning was delivered to Lady Night, and in almost the same period, the Inversion Tide’s true body broke free from the tower. While we previously speculated that the Inversion Tide would naturally attempt to contaminate the reclusive Lady Night, we can’t rule out another possibility: that Lady Night actively took measures in response to the ’Beware the sentinel towers’ warning and attempted to imprison the source of the sentinel’s contamination. As an ancient Goddess of Nature, the secrets she knows may far surpass our imagination. She may know what the Dragonkin did back then, know the Inversion Tide, know the sentinel towers—if so, it’s very plausible she would act upon that knowledge..."

Here he paused for a moment, letting out a soft sigh. "Of course, we truly have no way to confirm any of this. For now we can only boldly assume one fact: over the past roughly six hundred years, Lady Night, having received the warning, has been holding back the Inversion Tide’s advance, buying six centuries of time for our world... right up until today. If this is indeed the case, then the efforts of the Elven Twins and Modir were by no means in vain. Our world has already survived because of their actions—at least, survived to this day."

Modir had been quietly listening at the side. In truth, he could only understand part of what Gawain and Amber were discussing. Half of the memories he’d lost were still nowhere to be found, and most of what remained were only faint impressions—but Gawain’s words still eased the old Mage’s heart a little. He showed a complicated smile and spoke in a low voice: "Though I still don’t remember the specifics of those days, as long as the efforts of that pair of elf sisters weren’t wasted, then I feel much better inside..."

"Of course their efforts won’t be in vain, it’s just that I’m really worried about one problem now... how much longer can Lady Night, fighting all alone, keep stalling it?" Gawain shook his head slightly. "Her battle with the Inversion Tide seems to have reached a stalemate, but in our real world, the out-of-control sentinel towers apparently have already begun to act. By using the cloned bodies of Reyna and Ferna as shells, it’s been moving in secret within the Gondor wasteland all this time, while the forces we’ve amassed beneath the great walls are still not enough to break straight through that vast polluted zone... Right now we don’t even have a way to confirm what those evil cult followers are doing."

"According to the hypothesis you just made, if the sentinel towers really did release the true body of the Inversion Tide six hundred years ago by creating the Deep Blue Rift, then it should be very familiar with this planet’s ’The Deep Blue Webway’—after all, it possesses the advanced knowledge left behind by the Voyager." Kamel suddenly spoke up from the side, the arcane magic surging and flickering across his body, showing that this ancient Arcane Master was performing an extremely rapid chain of thought. "And this fits precisely with our earlier conjecture that ’abnormal surges are taking place within The Deep Blue Webway’..."

Kamel’s words further tied together the many clues that had surfaced over this period of time, and allowed those in the small hut to glimpse more clearly the outline of the truth behind the layers of fog. Gawain instinctively sank into deep thought, but just as he was halfway through sorting his ideas, the sound of vast wings beating the air and the impact tremor of a landing suddenly came from outside, cutting off his and everyone else’s train of thought.

The next second, he heard heavy footsteps approaching the hut, and Melita Ponia’s voice—low and commanding after she had taken on her dragon form—came from beyond the door: "Gawain! Come out here, quickly! I saw something up in the sky!"

The people in the hut instinctively looked toward the doorway, and at once they noticed the light spilling in from the door dim all of a sudden—the huge shadow was drawing near. A massive dragon head stretched forward, trying to poke into the doorframe. Naturally, it couldn’t fit, so the dragon’s snout quickly shifted away from the doorway, replaced by a gigantic eye. That eye rolled around, sweeping over the inside of the hut, while Melita Ponia’s full-throated voice came from outside a nearby window: "Gawain! Are you in there? I can’t see clearly."

The scene was almost exactly like those "terrifying dragon stories" described by the bards—truly, Art comes from reality.

Gawain strode quickly toward the door, raising his voice as he walked: "I’m here, I’m here—stop shouting, you’re about to deafen all of us! What exactly did you find?"

Kamel drifted along behind Gawain as they headed out of the hut, muttering casually as he floated, "I don’t have ears..."

Melita Ponia finally pulled her head back from the hut’s doorway. She lowered her body in a rather awkward posture, shuffling backward in little steps while watching Gawain and the others as they emerged from inside. Her expression looked unusually grave (of course, it wasn’t easy to read expressions on the face she currently had): "I saw other ports—and on those ports... other ships! You should come and see for yourselves, it’s quite a sight!"

"Other ports?! Other ships?!" At Melita Ponia’s words, Gawain’s eyes widened slightly at once, and he felt a chill surge in from all around. But very quickly he realized from Melita Ponia’s gaze that things were probably not as simple as he imagined, and he hurried toward the blue dragon’s lowered wing. "Take me to see—everyone else stay down here for now. Amber, you stay too. Modir has only just stabilized, and this place has a strange environment; keep an eye on his condition."

Having said this, he was already on Melita Ponia’s broad back, and the next second, the dragon soared into the air.

The astonishing scale of the "Mother Harbor" meant it also possessed an astonishingly large defensive great barrier. Above this mega-structure that was almost like a man-made continent, the dome formed by the energy shields was, even for a creature as enormous as a dragon, a "sky" wide enough to fly freely. Melita Ponia didn’t need to fly low as she had on the ship, but instead climbed straight up toward that domed sky. At the same time, her deep voice reached Gawain’s ears: "Right after I went out, I wanted to observe the surrounding terrain from high altitude, so I flew a bit further out—and I saw things that we couldn’t see from the angle when the ship was landing earlier."

As she spoke, she adjusted her course slightly, and the vast Steel Ground below began to tilt off to one side in Gawain’s field of view, while the distant scenery gradually came into sight.

"When the ship was landing before, the angle of descent meant our line of sight was blocked by the crown of the Reincarnation Giant Tree, so we couldn’t see what lay farther out," Melita Ponia continued. "But now... just look. The situation is plain as day."

Gawain stood up and walked to where Melita Ponia’s shoulder blades were, then gazed into the distance.

He saw another port at the edge of the "continent"—that port had been torn to pieces by some unknown force. Hideously twisted steel wreckage extended into the darkness like a burst-open wound, and in the void near the port, another ship floated, destroyed—though it had been completely broken into three sections, the remaining outline of its main body was still easy to recognize. It was clearly identical to the ship that had carried Gawain and the others here!

Gawain’s eyes widened, and then he lifted his gaze to look even farther out—at the very limit of his vision lay yet another port that had been ripped apart, and another ship that had been annihilated.

"Aside from the ship we came on, all the other ships and their berths have been destroyed," Melita Ponia said. "Though they’re far away, the ships and ports are all huge; you can see their state clearly even from a long distance. This ’Mother Harbor’ beneath our feet is roughly shaped like a hexagonal snowflake. Originally, there should have been a ship and its corresponding mooring at every ’point’... but now there’s only one left."

"Who did this? Was it an attack from outside?" Gawain asked instinctively.

"It was civil war."

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