Ashes Of Deep Sea

Chapter 3: Drifting by the Edge

Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio

The wooden goat head looked at Duncan, who was sitting by the map table with its black eyes. It was as if its obsidian eyes were flickering, but, in truth, it could not express emotion on its face. However, Duncan could clearly see the expectation on its face.

That wasn’t the goat head’s first time urging him to raise the sails. The head would do it whenever he came into the captain’s cabin.

He could even feel the ship itself urging him to resume the journey so that it could end the aimless drift on the sea and return to the right path.

Yet, Duncan remained silent. The powerful-looking face was dark as he slumped into a deep thinking process. He clearly found two different problems.

First, he was the only person onboard the ship, and the vessel was inhumanely massive. The ship, Lost Home, relied on sails to move, and Duncan roughly put the ship’s length at 150 to 200 meters long. To manage such a vast ship, he would at least need a dozen of years and even a few hundred years of experience as a sailor. He had no confidence in doing that alone.

Second, even if he had the experience, another thing was stopping him from beginning the journey. He had no idea how to captain a ship.

Duncan was slightly anxious. He tried to imagine what would happen if he asked the strange and annoying goat head how to captain the ship. After thinking of the response, he got even more worried.

The goat head had no idea what its captain was thinking about. “Captain, is something worrying you? If you’re worried about the Lost Home’s condition, then there’s nothing for you to worry about. The Lost Home is always prepared to sail to the world’s edge with you. Or, could it be that you’re worried that something unlucky might happen if we sail today? I know a little fortune reading. Which do you believe in? Constellations? Tarot? Or crystal ball? Now that I think about it, do you remember last time when the crystal…”

Duncan tried his best to control his facial expression while holding back his urge to yell at the goat head. “I’ll go check the situation on the deck. Just wait here quietly.”

“I understand. But, I do have to remind you that the Lost Home has been drifting aimlessly for a long time. You have to take control of the helm soon and put the ship back on the right course,” the goat head replied. Then, with the cracking sound, it returned to its original position.

It was as if the world had finally quieted down for Duncan.

He let out another sigh of relief again. He started to calm down and picked the flintlock pistol off the table before getting up to leave the captain’s cabin.

The old flintlock pistol was found by him when he was exploring the ship. Along with the pistol was a one-handed sword. By his waist now hung the sword, and those two items were meant to be a form of protection when he wandered on the ship.

It took him a long time to roughly learn how to use the two weapons in his past few days of exploration. However, up until now, he had yet to meet other living beings on the ship other than him.

That was excluding items that could speak.

The fishy sea breeze managed to calm Duncan’s annoyance down a little. He walked onto the deck outside the cabin and subconsciously raised his head to look at the sky.

The thick rainclouds still covered the sky up to the horizon’s edge. He could not see the sun, moon, or even stars. Only dim light could pass through the cloud and faintly reflect off the seemingly endless ocean.

The view had been the same for a very long time. Ever since Duncan arrived on the ship, the sky had remained the same. It even made him wonder if normal weather did not exist in the new world, that the thick rainclouds would forever loom over the ocean.

Duncan turned around and looked at the door to the captain’s cabin, quietly sitting at the end of the deck. On top of the door was a line of words, which he couldn’t read, carved into the wall. However, when he focused on the line of words, he could understand what they meant in his head.

“Door of Lost Home.”

“The Door of Lost Home… The Lost Home, huh?” Duncan mumbled before laughing mockingly at himself. “This ship sure has a good name.”

He then walked past the cabin and up the stairs at the edge of the deck to the quarter deck at the stern of the ship. There was a wooden platform, and that was the second best place with a wide view of the sea other than the crow’s nest.

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A black helm sat quietly on the platform, waiting for the captain to steer it.

Duncan frowned. He had no idea why a sense of urgency and anxiousness suddenly shrouded him, and these emotions seemed to appear whenever he looked at the helm.

He did not experience such a thing when he headed to the quarter deck the past few times.

A sudden chaotic wind swept past the deck, kicking the waves high up in the air as if to match the anxiousness inside him. Although the waves would not affect a ship as massive as the Lost Home, they still alerted Duncan. The next second, he turned to look toward the ship’s bow.

In front of the Lost Home and between the water and the murky sky, a seemingly endless and wall-like white fog appeared out of nowhere, making him widen his eyes.

The white fog looked like it could surround the entire world and separate it from everything else. The ship was moving toward the fog fast, but rather than the humungous mist size, what made Duncan even more worried was that it reminded him of the endless white fog he could see from the window in his studio apartment room.

The Lost Home was drifting straight toward it.

Duncan had no idea what the fog was and what lay deep inside it, but he could feel that it was extremely dangerous. His survival instinct told him that getting swallowed by the fog was a bad idea.

He instinctively rushed toward the helm but was quickly taken over by a sense of helplessness. Even if he had his hands on the helm, he didn’t know how to steer the ship away from collision with the fog on his own.

However, he still arrived at the helm. When he arrived, a hoarse and gloomy voice came from the bronze tube next to the helm connected to the captain’s cabin. It was from the goat head. This time, the voice of the mysterious item sounded as if it was slightly panicking.

“Captain! We’ve detected the collapse of the border in front of us. We are very close to the edge of reality! Please turn the ship back!”

Duncan almost yelled back after hearing the goat head’s panicked voice. “Dude, do you think that’s easy? Why don’t you just make 80 men who know how to steer this thing appear instead of asking me to do it?” he screamed in his head.

He then raised his head to look at the masts on the ship’s deck. The desperation became even more prominent when he saw those masts. Even if he wanted to lower the sails, there were no sails for him to do that. The ship had no sails, and the masts were all empty.

With his adrenaline rushing, he didn’t even have time to consider all the weird terms that the goat head had said. His basic instinct made him subconsciously grab the helm in front of him that was slightly shaking for reasons he did not know.

That was the first time he had put his hands on the helm of the Lost Home in the past few days. The strange phenomenons and the goat head had been repetitively urging him to steer the ship all those times, and he had been against the idea of “steering” the ship. However, now, the hesitation was no more an option for him.

He grabbed the helm tightly. His blank mind didn’t even have the time to wonder how he was supposed to steer a giant ghost ship on his own.

However, changes happened right after that.

A sound that resembled a strong wind on the mountain and at sea exploded inside Duncan’s head. It also sounded like tens of thousands of people cheering by the shore as the ship departed from the dock as if millions of sailors were cheering the captain’s name on the pier. Amidst those were also hints of a bleak pirate song and the sound of terrifying waves.

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A ball of green flame suddenly appeared at the edge of Duncan’s field of view. He instinctively looked at his palm and saw a ball of emerald green fire suddenly appear on the helm of the Lost Home, and it quickly spread like wildfire, covering his entire body almost instantly.

Inside the raging flame, his body suddenly became something similar to a void. His captain uniform was now torn and wrinkled as if it had been soaked in seawater for hundreds of years. Duncan could vaguely see the bones on his body that had become something like a spirit. Fire danced on his crystal-like bones while eternal fire flew through his veins like water.

Despite all the flames he saw, he didn’t feel pain or the sensation of being burned. As the fire continued to burn, he could feel his senses spreading out in all directions.

The flame started spreading from the quarter-deck, past the main deck, the port, the starboard, and the masts. The fire spread out and formed nets on the deck before slowly rising up the masts. They eventually formed huge sails that rose high up into the sky.

The sails of the Lost Home had been lowered and were speeding towards the edge of reality that was crumbling.