The captain's words were like the chill night wind, passing through the increasingly dim staircase. Alice instinctively hugged her arms and followed closer behind Duncan. As they descended further, she finally understood what the captain meant by "the lights are black."
There really were lights in the lower deck—at least, judging from its structure and layout. The cabins she saw had support pillars like those above, with ever-burning oil lamps hanging from them. Those lamps were burning, yet their flames made the areas around them darker than places farther away.
Yes, the closer one got to an oil lamp, the dimmer the light became. The lamps themselves were almost shrouded in shadow, their outlines barely visible. Yet farther away from them, the light gradually increased—the corners of the hold were even nearly as bright as the upper decks.
The reason it had looked so abnormally dark from the stairs was precisely because two lamps hung on either side of the stairway below. Visually, it was as though those lamps were actively releasing darkness, neutralizing and annihilating the light already present in the hold.
Alice stared wide-eyed at the overall dim cabin. After a long while, she muttered, "Th-this... is this even reasonable...?"
"You, an unreasonable doll, are asking me whether something is reasonable?" Duncan glanced at the clearly nervous Alice. "Below the sea level of the Boundless Sea, things being reasonable is the most unreasonable thing of all."
His expression was quite calm when he said this, as if such bizarre circumstances were merely minor incidents he had long grown used to. But in truth, his reaction was exactly the same as Alice's—even the spectral pigeon on his shoulder suddenly flapped its wings and voiced his thoughts: "Does this make sense? Does this make sense? Does this make sense..."
Duncan