Deep Sea Embers

After the sun was extinguished, the remaining faint light hung high in the sky. The faint light could not illuminate the sea, but instead made the whole world look darker and more terrifying.

The White Oak sailed in this dark depth.

The lights on the boat have been turned on, and the combined brilliance of oil lamps and electric lighting diffuses out, illuminating a small piece of sea surface nearby. The fine waves undulate between the weak lights, which seem to have a viscous and ominous texture.

Lawrence held the rudder, responding to the voice in his mind: "...The condition of the White Oak is fine. Except for the nervousness of the sailors, there is nothing wrong with the ship, but we have fallen into darkness around us, and I lost contact with other ships on the channel, and the navigation also failed, and now I can only see darkness in the stargazing room."

Duncan's voice echoed directly in his mind: "Can you contact the nearest Cold Harbor to you? You should have just left that city-state not long ago."

"No," Lawrence looked back at the communication station not far away, and saw that all the lights on the machine were red, "The communication is completely cut off. The pastor tried to use psychic resonance to contact the cathedral in Cold Harbor, but it didn't work." When it comes to the response—the psychic resonance with Purand can barely be maintained."

"There is nothing wrong with Purand, and Frost is fine. The current situation is that, except for the three city-states of Frost, Purand, and Qingfeng Harbor, all the city-states have been unable to contact, giving people the feeling... It's as if they all disappeared after the sun went out."

Listening to Captain Duncan's description, Lawrence's expression gradually became tense, and he swallowed hard, as if he didn't dare to continue thinking about it.

Then he glanced down at the instrument panel next to the steering wheel, quickly confirming various parameters.

"We are sailing towards Prand at full speed. This is a very busy shipping route. In theory, we should see a transit port in the near future - that is a subsidiary island of the city-state of Lunsa. We will confirm the situation there. , and remit to you as soon as possible..."

Lawrence was speaking so quickly in his mind, but before he finished speaking, a sudden sound of hurried footsteps interrupted what he wanted to say later.

A crew member ran into the bridge in a panic: "Captain! Captain! Come and take a look! That 'sailor' discovered something terrible!"

"Anomaly 077?" Lawrence's expression changed instantly, and then he turned his head to look at the first officer beside him, "Gus, you take the helm, I'll go over and see the situation!"

The first mate, Gus, stepped forward immediately: "Yes, Captain!"

Lawrence quickly left the bridge, hurried through the stairs and corridors led by the crew member, and came to the aft deck of the White Oak. As soon as he came here, he saw the man busy Lulu's skinny figure.

Anomaly 077, this weird living mummy is busy doing something next to a huge iron bucket, talking non-stop while busy, Lawrence walked up to hear what the mummy kept talking about: "It's over It's over, it's over, we're over this time, no one can leave, no one can go back, the whole world is over, I might as well sleep to death..."

This product, as always, is full of negative energy.

Lawrence didn't want to listen to Anomaly 077's rant, so he immediately stepped forward and interrupted this guy loudly: "What are you doing?"

The mummy suddenly trembled, as if waking up from a dream, and quickly nodded and bowed: "Captain! Captain, you are here... oh, good, you will be safe when the captain comes..."

"Enough is enough," Lawrence waved his hand and asked again, "What are you doing?"

"You have to look at this, you have to look at this..." The mummy said hurriedly, then ran to the side of the iron bucket, and stirred it twice with a big iron tongs - there was a sound of sticky grease coming from inside.

It was only then that Lawrence realized that the iron bucket was full of oil, and Anomaly 077 was holding a piece of rag in iron tongs and stirring it in the oil bucket, and then the mummy took out the oil-soaked rag, touched it again He took out a lighter from an unknown crew member and lit the cloth ball.

Under Lawrence's frowning gaze, Anomaly 077 threw the burning rag into the sea forcefully—the fireball fell on the sea surface, and quickly drifted to the rear of the White Oak with the waves.

Anomaly 077 babbled: "This is the way the sailors used to roughly estimate the speed of the ship - before your fancy machines were invented, it's not accurate, but it's very useful..."

"I know, I know about it," Lawrence interrupted, "but what exactly do you want me to see?"

"Sailor" waved his hand vigorously, and pointed to the distance again: "Keep watching, it's almost there, look at the fire drifting away..."

Lawrence frowned, and turned his head to stare at the ball of flames floating on the sea—it was rapidly drifting to the rear of the White Oak, which was natural, because the White Oak was sailing forward at full speed, so this phenomenon did not What an oddity.

Until the flame suddenly stopped in the distance.

Lawrence's eyes froze for a moment.

Theoretically, the ball of fire should keep drifting far away until it was finally swallowed by the waves or exceeded the limit of the naked eye, and stopped in the distance.

Roughly estimated, that location is only a few hundred meters away from the White Oak.

Lawrence stared at that direction, looking at the group of flames that stopped several hundred meters behind the White Oak. In this scene, it seemed that the flames were sailing at a constant speed with the White Oak, until after a long time, the flames Finally, it gradually weakened and extinguished at the edge of the dark sea water.

The "sailor" picked up a piece of rag with iron tongs, ignited it and threw it into the water after it was covered with grease.

The second fire ball entered the water, drifted backwards quickly, and then stopped at the same distance.

Anomaly 077 finally threw away the iron tongs in his hand. He turned his head to look at Lawrence, a frowning expression seemed to appear on his skinny and terrifying face: "Captain, look...how can we explain this matter with science?"

This time, Lawrence did not open his mouth to ridicule this "abnormality" as he did in the past, but was obsessed with explaining things scientifically. He just stood quietly on the edge of the deck, and after an unknown period of time, he said to himself, "You see it?"

Anomaly 077 next to him was taken aback when he heard the words: "Huh? Who are you talking to?"

Lawrence didn't answer, but Duncan's deep and majestic voice came from his mind: "I saw it, and I saw it very clearly by sharing your vision."

"What... do you think of this phenomenon?" Lawrence asked cautiously.

"The laws of physics are becoming strange. It is very likely that the 'chaos' in the space domain may be the reason, or it may be a deeper reason. In short, after the sun is extinguished, the Great Sea is changing rapidly-and the White Oak and everything around it Small area, it's still normal for now."

Lawrence thought for a while, then said hesitantly, "This is your power at work..."

"Maybe, but I also need some time to figure out why."

Listening to the voice in his head and looking at the dark and chaotic sea in the distance, Lawrence fell into deep thought.

However, at this moment, a strange low-pitched sound that seemed to come from the sky and seemed to reverberate in the whole world suddenly interrupted his thinking.

It was a strange, sluggish hum, like the gasping of a gigantic beast, or the slow start of some unimaginably large device, which sounded faint and distant, yet filled with Like the whole world, echoing in everyone's ears.

Lawrence raised his head in astonishment, and looked at the extinguished sun.

The double rune rings around the sun are flickering brightly and darkly, and with the flickering of the rune rings, the dark sphere at the center of the anomaly 001 is gradually showing wisps of glow.

The strands of light were faintly red at first, like bloodshot eyes, but then, they began to spread to the entire sphere, and quickly became brighter...

...

The huge luminous geometry floats on the sea surface, and its evenly released "sunlight" shines on the Qingfeng Harbor not far away, as well as the Brilliant Star, which is docked near the floating pier.

On the scientific research platform at the highest point of the Brilliant Star, Lucrezia was staring closely at the large round crystal lens in front of her.

There is a light blue shimmer floating around the crystal lens, while the center of the lens presents groups of undulating, alternating light and dark colors.

The wind-up puppet "Luni" was standing near Lucrecia, and was using her precise and dexterous hands to adjust the dazzling observation equipment while reporting to her hostess: "From now on, the luminous geometry released There are these weird 'signals' in the 'sunlight' that come out, they are invisible to the naked eye, but they can be captured by the observation lens on the ship, and what they show is this kind of light and dark ripples that are constantly rising and falling..."

Lucrezia raised her head and looked towards the front of the room—this scientific research platform is closed, but there is a special window at the end of the room, through which the "sunlight" from the luminous geometry is introduced into the room, and then passes through a A series of complex lens devices are processed, and finally split into spectrograms and projected onto a specific observation device, and this whole set of devices is designed and built by her.

It's a large-scale installation she built specifically to study that "luminous geometry"—and now, it's working.

Lucrezia withdrew her gaze, and glanced at the recording instrument on the table next to it that was constantly spewing out paper tapes—the long paper tapes recorded the spectral changes captured by the lens system, and the jumping black lines showed clear and clear periodicity.

"These 'light signals' are regular..." she said softly.

"Yes," the puppet Luni nodded. "Each set of signals is sent for a period of twelve seconds. After repeating three times, there will be an interval of thirty seconds, and then it will appear again."

"Is it sent from that 'stone ball'?"

"I can't be sure—there are people from the Academy of Truth monitoring the stone ball, but they haven't noticed any changes in the ball itself. These 'light signals' seem to be born out of thin air directly from the luminous area around the ball..."

The puppet Luni stopped suddenly in the middle of her speech.

"Mistress, the light signal has stopped."

Lucrecia looked at the crystal lens in front of her in astonishment.

The light and dark, rising and falling colors have disappeared.

She froze for a while, then seemed to suddenly think of something, the figure suddenly disintegrated, turned into colorful pieces of paper flying in all directions and rushed out of the window in a circle.

The colorful pieces of paper were flying over the deck, quickly re-condensing into shape, Lucrezia stood on the upper deck of the Bright Star, squinted her eyes, and looked up at the sky.

Through the pale golden "sunlight" that diffused over the sea, she saw an extraordinarily bright luminous body hanging high in the sky.

The sun was lit again.