History

This feeling was quite strange.

Duncan could clearly sense what was happening far away—he could feel the Lost Homeland drifting across the vast Boundless Sea. The living ghost ship was steadily charting routes under the control of a Goat Head. A Cursed Doll with a rather unstable head wandered around the cabins, familiarizing herself with the ship as if on an adventure. The deep, dark sea rose and fell slowly around it, concealing countless bizarre things beneath its surface.

Yet through another line of sight, he was sitting in an antique shop in the lower district of Pland City-State. The voices of pedestrians and passing vehicles drifted in from the street, making the quiet within the shop feel all the more pronounced. A human girl named Nina sat across from him, taking small bites of the cheapest cake available in the lower district.

He was Captain Duncan, master of the Lost Homeland, a roaming calamity upon the Boundless Sea—yet here he sat like an ordinary man, eating breakfast amid the peaceful bustle of everyday life.

Perhaps it was an illusion, but he felt that some part of him that had always been suspended in unease was slowly settling down. Perhaps it was the nerves he had kept taut for too long aboard the ghost ship, or perhaps something else, but he felt that this could not be a bad thing.

Perhaps noticing his gaze, Nina suddenly looked up from her cake. She glanced curiously at Duncan. "Uncle Duncan, aren't you eating?"

Duncan looked at the food on her plate. "Is that enough for you?"

"It's enough. Too many sweets aren't good for you."

"Mm."

Duncan nodded, picked up his cake, and took a bite. He carefully savored the rich flavor he had not tasted in a long time, feeling the crude sweetness slowly melt across his tongue—then he clearly sensed this body beginning to process the food he had eaten.

His heart settled slightly. Things were as he had expected.

This body was more "usable" than the shell he had temporarily occupied the first time—it had all its "parts" intact, and it had not been dead for long. His soul's takeover had almost seamlessly restarted the life within it. It was completely different from that previous broad-minded corpse.

He was breathing now. Blood flowed through his veins, and his heart was beating too—though it seemed to be beating a little slowly, it should still be within the normal human range.

He probably no longer had to worry about the body rotting, nor did he need to consider soaking it in preservatives. And this would make it less likely for him to expose himself before ordinary people.

However, there was one thing Duncan was still unsure about.

He knew that this body should have been ill—in the memories he had absorbed, the negative impression of being plagued by chronic illness was deeper than all the others. The strong liquor and painkillers he had found in the cabinet earlier were also clear evidence.

He did not know what illness this body had suffered from before. Matters such as when it began and what had triggered it seemed to belong to memories from a long time ago, already blurred beyond recognition. But one thing was obvious: at this very moment, aside from the weakness brought by an ordinary human physique, he could not feel anything wrong with this body.

Had the illness disappeared? Had this body healed itself because of Spirit World Walk? Or were the senses of the projected soul ultimately limited, leaving him unable to detect the body's problems while its health continued to worsen?

As Duncan pondered, he continued eating without giving anything away. Then he suddenly looked at Nina, who was eating across from him. "Don't you have school today?"

Nina lived in the lower district. Her family's financial circumstances were not particularly good, but Pland City-State had clearly developed to the point where basic education was relatively widespread. She was currently attending a school jointly established by the Church and City Hall, specializing in steam machinery—such schools could be viewed as vocational high schools, primarily intended to supply factories and churches with skilled steam craftsmen.

Half of Nina's tuition was paid by her uncle, while the other half came from a subsidy from City Hall.

For a city-state that had developed into the industrial age, even subsidizing the training of such craftsmen was quite worthwhile—and it could not be denied that these highly purpose-driven schools had at least solved the problem of literacy among commoners.

Nina was a diligent student. In her uncle's memories, the girl had fairly excellent grades in every subject.

"I don't have any classes this morning," Nina said, nodding. "I only have two history classes in the afternoon. And later, I need to tell Mrs. White that I won't be staying in the dorm these next few days..."

Duncan suddenly stopped moving. He looked at Nina seriously and asked, "Don't you think staying here to take care of someone like me will hold you back in many ways? You could live at school long-term. That might be better for your studies."

Nina froze. She stared blankly at her "Uncle Duncan," then suddenly grew angry. "You shouldn't say things like that! You're only sick. You just need to take your medicine as the doctor instructed—Mom and Dad entrusted you to me..."

"It was your parents who entrusted you to me," Duncan corrected her seriously. He organized his words using the memories in his mind as he spoke. "You were only six then."

"But I'm seventeen now," Nina said, puffing out her cheeks as she stabbed the last piece of cake with her fork. "You're even worse than me at taking care of yourself—if I really moved out, you'd turn the room into a complete mess in less than three days. Actually, you could even let me help manage the shop. At least I could clean it. The display window is so dirty you can barely see through it..."

Duncan listened helplessly to the girl's rambling "lecture." He had not expected a casual remark meant as a test to provoke such a strong reaction from her.

But gradually, he could not help smiling.

From this girl named Nina, he felt a kind of warmth... the warm, gentle feeling of basking in sunlight.

"All right, I was only saying it casually," he said, shaking his head as he stirred the last bit of soup in his bowl. "History class this afternoon... How have you been doing in history lately?"

"Uncle Duncan, are you really all right?" Nina's eyes widened in surprise. "You've never... well, at least not in the past two years, you've never asked about what I do at school."

Duncan opened his mouth, just about to say something, but the girl continued on her own. "We've been studying ancient history lately. Old Mr. Morris has been teaching us about what happened after the Great Annihilation... Honestly, it's pretty interesting. A lot of ancient history sounds like stories, much more interesting than modern and contemporary history."

Duncan thought for a moment and put on a serious expression. "Sounds like you've learned quite a bit. Then let me test you. What are the relevant concepts of the Great Annihilation?"

Uncle Duncan was acting very strangely today. She could not say exactly what was strange about him, but he was simply different from usual.

But Nina did not think too much about it—compared to her uncle's slightly unusual behavior, this simple-hearted girl was happier that Uncle Duncan had finally cheered up and seemed to be in a good mood.

She was delighted that the question Duncan had asked was something she had only just mastered.

So, with a proud smile, she began telling Duncan about the knowledge she had just learned:

"The Great Annihilation occurred approximately ten thousand years ago—although ethnic minorities with distinctive cultural traditions, such as elves, the Senjin people, and the Gipro people, record inconsistent dates in their own calendars for unknown reasons, the archaeological community generally recognizes that the Great Annihilation occurred at the end of the Order Era, ten thousand years ago..."

Duncan listened with a calm expression.

His mind was full of question marks.

Elves? The Senjin people? The Gipro people? What was going on? So humans were not the only intelligent race on land? And elves... were they the same concept of "elves" that he understood? Could there actually be elf city-states living in the steam industrial age on the Boundless Sea?

Some extremely bizarre images could not help surfacing in his mind, while Nina's voice continued from across the table:

"...The various city-states differ somewhat in their records of the Great Annihilation, but the more commonly accepted parts are that the Order Era before the Great Annihilation was an age far more prosperous, stable, and safe than the present. At that time, there were immensely vast continents, the oceans were nowhere near as boundless as they are today, and neither sea nor land had an endpoint like the so-called 'Reality Border'...

"The era after the Great Annihilation is called the 'Deep Sea Era.' The Deep Sea Era has continued to this day, with no sign of ending. Its most notable feature is that the Boundless Sea covers almost the entire world, while less than a tenth of the old land remains, all divided into islands of varying sizes or 'Misty Otherworlds.' Many present-day city-states were built on relatively stable islands, while ocean-going ships became the means by which the islands exchanged goods and kept in contact with one another.

"In the early Deep Sea Era, the surviving remnants of the Old World suffered devastating blows, and the old civilization was almost entirely destroyed. The Ancient Kingdom of Crete, which first rose from the ruins, was the earliest known ancestor civilization of the Deep Sea Era. Although that ancient kingdom lasted less than a century, it left behind many legacies with profound influence on later generations, including the earliest crude methods of classifying the many anomalies and phenomena of the Deep Sea Era, as well as a great deal of precious experience in surviving within the Deep Sea Era..."