Deep Sea Embers

After inspecting the deck area, Duncan decided to enter the cabin of the ship.

Thankfully, they quickly found a large door leading to the cabin.

It was a rusty iron door embedded in a white wall. The door handle was severely decayed, and the lock had long been ruined by the seawater, leaving the door tightly shut, obviously impossible to open by conventional means.

Morris stepped forward to examine the state of the door, then abandoned the idea of opening it normally and turned to the others, “We might have to use a bit of force.”

“Allow me,” Vanna volunteered without waiting for others to speak up, “Everyone else, step back a bit to avoid being injured by debris.”

Shirley, Alice, and the others obediently backed away while Duncan merely shifted a couple of steps to the side to avoid getting his clothes dirty. With curious eyes, they watched the female warrior approach the completely rusted iron door and then… tapped it lightly with her hand.

With a short hum, a large hole collapsed and shattered in the center, sending numerous fragments to scatter and tear apart before the main segment disintegrated into dust.

Vanna then reached out and tore a few more pieces of the remaining steel from the door frame, like tearing paper, and casually tossed them aside.

Shirley and Dog watched this scene, dumbfounded, and after a while, they broke the silence in unison, “… Damn, is she even human?”

Vanna, of course, heard Shirley and Dog’s voices, turned her head and smiled, “I always keep up with my physical training.”

Shirley’s mouth twitched noticeably, muttering quietly, “This… has nothing to do with physical training anymore, right?”

Duncan was also impressed by Vanna’s straightforward solution, but having witnessed her feats in the city-states before, he didn’t have much of a reaction. He just looked up at the smoke-filled door and asked, “What’s the situation inside?”

Vanna waved her hand, waiting for the dust to settle a bit before peeking inside. Her expression suddenly became strange.

After a few seconds, she stepped back and turned to Duncan, “Inside… there’s another door.”

“Another door?” Duncan was taken aback for a moment, took a few steps to look for himself, and sure enough, he saw another rusty iron door standing right in front of him – only a few meters away from the outer door.

However, the space between the two doors was neither a corridor nor a foyer, nor did it resemble a specially designed security partition. It was just an empty area with no devices, furnishings, or additional windows, only bare walls and an oddly twisted and distorted ceiling.

“…I’m not sure if this is the normal structure of the Obsidian,” Morris also came over to take a look and shook his head, “I only knew about this ship before, but I’ve never seen it in person.”

Duncan frowned slightly, then quickly nodded to Vanna, “Open that door.”

Vanna immediately went forward and smashed the second door inside in the same manner as before. She then peeked inside and looked back with a bewildered face, “Inside… there’s another door.”

“Another one?!” This time, even Shirley was surprised. She didn’t care about the safe distance and brought Dog closer, “My god… there really is another one?!”

Inside the second door was a third door with the same structure and the same peculiar “compartment.”

If there had only been a second door, it could be explained as a “special design of the Obsidian,” but now that there was a completely inexplicable and eerie “third door,” it was hard to dismiss it as “the ship’s design concept being ahead of its time.”

“The structure of this ship is not quite right,” Duncan looked back at the two previous doors, his expression becoming slightly serious, “Whether normal or not, there shouldn’t be such a design… Vanna, open this door as well.”

“Alright.” Vanna didn’t hesitate and punched the third door. This time, she only made a large hole before stopping, not continuing to clear the remaining steel on the door frame – because through that hole, she could already see the situation inside.

“Captain…” she spoke the title somewhat awkwardly, her expression even stranger than before, “Inside, there’s a wall.”

“A wall?!” Duncan’s eyes twitched, and he looked inside the hole, indeed seeing the “wall” Vanna mentioned.

There really was just a wall opposite the door, and the wall was less than half a meter away from the third one that it was almost touching.

“How could a ship be designed like this?” Nina muttered with a puzzled face, “Three doors and only a wall behind them… where’s the cabin? How do we get into the cabin?”

Duncan, however, did not speak. He just quietly looked at this oddly structured “overlapping area,” his eyes thoughtful as if he had realized something.

After a moment, he nodded to Vanna, “Keep making holes.”

Vanna immediately stepped forward, first kicking away the remaining door panels at the bottom of the third door that were in the way, then punched the strange wall – a hole even larger than before appeared before everyone with a loud rumble.

“It’s a corridor,” Vanna looked inside and turned to the others.

“Great,” Shirley immediately sighed in relief, “Finally, something normal…”

“It’s upside down,” Vanna interrupted Shirley before she could finish, “The ceiling is under our feet, and the floor is above our heads.”

Shirley: “…Damn.”

As Vanna said, there was only an upside-down corridor behind that wall – just like the previous three repeating doors, there was no normal structure inside the ghost ship’s cabin!

“This ship has been twisted…” Even a knowledgeable scholar like Morris was a bit at a loss at this point. He looked at the corridor structure across the wall in disbelief and muttered, “What has twisted the Obsidian like this…”

“Let’s think differently,” Duncan interrupted the old scholar, “Is this really the Obsidian?”

Morris suddenly looked up, astonished, at Duncan, “You mean…”

“We are near Frost, and beneath the ocean of Frost, some terrifying things have happened,” Duncan said casually, glancing at Alice, who was curiously looking around, “Remember the ‘Abyss Plan’ that Tyrian mentioned?”

“I remember, I remember,” Alice nodded vigorously, “And a bunch of submarines and stuff…”

“Remembering that much is enough,” Duncan said while patting Alice’s head, “Don’t nod anymore, it’s already shaking.”

He then raised his hand and knocked on the nearby wall.

The metal cabin wall made a hollow thud as it was knocked.

“Looks normal on the outside, but it’s actually a mess inside, with crude imitation and duplication, and overlapping internal spaces – this probably isn’t the real Obsidian, but it’s hard to say which ‘copy’ it is.”

Alice didn’t know how much she understood. She just slowly nodded her head with a drawn-out “Oh” in a pretentious manner. On the other hand, Vanna quickly reacted, “But I remember you saying before that the submarines that surfaced during the Abyss Plan only had twisted errors in the copying process of their crew, and the submarines themselves were correctly duplicated. At that time, you speculated that this error should be limited to humans or organisms…”

“Yes, limited to humans or organisms when the Frost Queen was alive half a century ago,” Duncan said slowly. “So the situation now is obviously worse. The duplication is no longer limited to the third submarine, and the distortion has extended to the inorganic domain… Whatever is in the depths of Frost’s ocean, it has clearly become active again after 50 years of silence, and its influence and intensity are far beyond what they were half a century ago.”

Shirley blinked as she listened. Everyone on the Vanished had heard about the Abyss Plan from the captain, so they all knew how strange and sinister it was. This made her subconsciously mutter, “I… I’m getting nervous…”

“Think differently. The captain is investigating this matter. I think it shouldn’t be us who should be nervous,” Dog also muttered softly, “Don’t scare yourself – my heart rate is going up too.”

Shirley was startled, “Dog, do you have a heart?”

“I’m a demon with a heart!”

“A heart is not the same thing as a ‘heart’ – isn’t your chest empty?”

“… What if there’s something inside that’s jumping?”

“Do you want to check?”

“No, that won’t work.”

Duncan didn’t pay attention to the increasingly bizarre murmurs around him. Instead, he simply speculated about the situation of the ghost ship and focused on the corridor that led to an unknown destination.

After a brief moment of contemplation, he walked towards the large hole that Vanna had blasted, “Let’s go inside and check it out.”