A faint creaking came from beneath Goat Head's head as its neck slowly turned on its base. It silently watched Duncan return to the Captain's Cabin, its gaze following the captain's movements.
Duncan went behind the chart table and sat in the high-backed chair, both hands resting on the tabletop. Thin mist drifted across the sea chart, its hazy fog shrouding everything. In this "sea" that had long since crossed the boundary, even this incredible chart seemed to have lost all meaning as a reference.
But Duncan's attention clearly was not on the mist-covered chart—his eyes were focused somewhere far more distant, as though he could see through the table and deck beneath him, gazing into the boundless void outside the Lost Homeland.
After a long while, Goat Head finally spoke cautiously. "I noticed just now... the 'environment' around the Lost Homeland underwent a major change. Was that your doing?"
Perhaps affected by the atmosphere, the usually talkative first mate did not waste much breath this time.
"I conducted some tests," Duncan said quietly. "I verified the hypothesis that information cannot be destroyed, and confirmed that the information in this Sea of Ashes can still sustain the operation of things. During... a brief test, ripples of change did indeed reappear within these cooled ashes."
"But it didn't continue, did it?" Goat Head said hesitantly. "I sensed it just now... the appearance and fading of the 'ripple' you mentioned. Though I don't understand the principles or processes involved, I could feel that something seemed to be missing behind those changes."
"The First Mover—a process of 'activation' that can instantaneously reset and fully restart the entire Mathematical Machine," Duncan said, not concealing the "knowledge" he had touched upon during that brief "ripple." "Simply put, temporarily and locally assigning values to some of