Deep Sea Embers

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The final corridor leading to the engine room was stuffy and dim. The incessant and irritating mechanical vibrations and roaring sounds seemed to burrow into one’s brain, and the lights on the walls appeared to be affected by unstable air currents, causing the flames inside the lampshades to flicker.

However, these were nothing compared to the increasing sense of unease and tension and the dizziness caused by the gradual tearing of thoughts.

Belazov controlled his steps and his expression.

The closer he got to the depths of the Seagull, the more he maintained his steady pace and his expression as calm as usual.

Crew members lingered in the corridor, chatting while wearing strange leather… “coats,” with folds of skin piled up on their faces and their voices sounding like buzzing noises.

Belazov approached them, and his mind told him that these sailors were his soldiers, but he couldn’t recall their names.

“General?” One of the soldiers stepped forward, curiously looking at Belazov, “Do you have any orders?”

“I’m just here to check on the engine room,” Belazov calmly replied to the unfamiliar soldier, “Stay at your posts.”

The soldier looked at him, saluted, and stepped back, “Yes, General.”

Belazov walked through the group of people, his steps steady as usual. He could feel the soldiers’ gaze linger on him for a moment, but they quickly turned away.

“Were they really his soldiers? Were they the crew of the Seagull? Were they the hidden entities? Or were they some kind of minions? Had they noticed? Or were they already on guard? Would these soldiers, whose names he couldn’t remember, pounce on him in the next second?”

Belazov suppressed all his thoughts until he reached the entrance to the engine room and opened the unlocked gate.

An even more piercing mechanical noise rushed toward him.

The steam core was running at full power, brewing an astonishing surge of energy within the spherical container. A complex piping system hissed on the ceiling of the engine room while massive connecting rods and gears quickly rotated in the steel frame at the end of the chamber.

The machinery seemed to be running very happily, even… happy to the point of fanaticism.

It was as if a restless soul was driving the heavy steel gears to spin rapidly, pushing the ship towards the civilized world at its limit.

The hissing sound from the steam pipes seemed to be mixed with indistinct whispers.

Belazov’s body swayed slightly, but he soon steadied himself and walked towards the steam core.

A priest was waving incense in front of the valve. He suddenly turned his head and looked at the general entering the engine room. The church emblem pinned to his chest seemed to be smeared with a layer of grease, making the sacred symbol on it blurry.

“General?” The priest looked at him curiously, “Why did you suddenly come here? This place is…”

“I came to check on… the steam core,” Belazov said, his eyes falling on the censer in the priest’s hand – the small, fleshy orb swayed gently in the air, its pale eye opening wide at the general’s presence.

He raised his head again, looking at the running steam engines and the hissing pipe systems.

The gas escaping from the steam pipes had a bloody hue, and the edges of the rapidly spinning gears were blurry and distorted as if something was parasitizing this massive machine, replacing the originally sacred steam with its malicious soul.

The machine had been contaminated, in a state of desecration—this thought flashed through Belazov’s mind for a second, but it quickly disappeared.

Nevertheless, he still walked toward the control panel of the steam core. Even though the colossal “steel heart” seemed normal in his eyes at the moment, he slowly reached out his hand to the control panel.

“General,” a greasy mechanic suddenly walked over from the side, reaching out his hand to block the control lever, “Don’t touch these, sometimes machines can be quite fragile.”

Belazov looked up at the mechanic.

The latter just calmly met his gaze.

But suddenly, the mechanic’s lips wriggled a few times.

Belazov frowned slightly, reading a few words from the mechanic’s lip movements—

“The machine is possessed, cannot be shut down or destroyed.”

Belazov was taken aback for a moment, and then saw the mechanic turn to the side, fiddling with the levers while his lips wriggled slightly. “The priest is not to be trusted… Situation out of control… Contingency 22.”

“Contingency 22?”

Belazov’s heart tightened, but soon, he knew what he had to do.

The mechanic knew the ship’s “heart” better than anyone else.

He turned and left the engine room, not heading to any other cabin, but maintained a calm demeanor after leaving the lower corridor, returning to his captain’s quarters.

From time to time, soldiers came forward to greet him, some of whom gave him a vague impression, while others he could not remember their names at all.

There must be still sane and normal human beings among these soldiers, but Belazov had no way to distinguish them, nor the time to contact or discern the other thirty humans on board besides himself and the mechanic.

He locked the door to his captain’s quarters, went to the safe by the desk, and began turning the combination lock. With the crisp and pleasant clicking sound, his fingers grew increasingly pale from the force.

As the latch opened with a soft click, the safe door opened.

Belazov’s gaze skipped over the compartments where the documents were stored and fell on the red button at the bottom of the box.

Beside the button, a line of small text was marked: Contingency 22, for use only in extreme situations.

Belazov reached out for the button, and almost at the same time, he heard a knock on the door: “General, are you in there? We have received instructions from Frost, and they need your personal attention.”

It was the voice of his executive officer.

A moment of hesitation suddenly surged in Belazov’s heart about the possibility of him making a wrong judgment.

What if there was actually no problem on the ship, and the only problem was with himself? What if he had suffered mild contamination, causing cognitive and memory biases and even hallucinations all the way… If that was the case, he was about to bury an entire ship for his own paranoia!

“General, are you in there? We have received orders from Frost…” The knocking on the door grew more urgent.

Suddenly, Belazov snapped out of his thoughts, realizing that those ideas might not be in line with his character… He wasn’t the type of person to hesitate at the final step of an action.

Someone was injecting “impurities” into his thoughts!

“Damn heretics!” Without any hesitation, Belazov immediately pressed the red button.

After an extremely short delay, a terrifying explosion engulfed the entire ship—the mechanical ship Seagull was instantly enveloped in a flash of light and flames, torn apart by the powerful blast of explosives.

The burning wreckage of the Seagull floated on the surface for a while before being gradually pushed towards the northern waters of Frost by the ocean currents. Eventually, the fiery remains began to sink faster, as if being dragged down by some invisible force, disappearing entirely beneath the waves.

…

Simultaneously, within the Frost city-state, near Cemetery No. 3, an elderly, slightly hunchbacked caretaker wearing a black coat was slowly making his way back from the city district.

He had just bought some daily necessities from a nearby street and was now hurrying back to his “post” before his shift change.

The path to the cemetery was quiet and secluded, with few passersby. Even so, the few who did pass by would unconsciously adjust their pace to keep some distance from the somber, hunchbacked old man.

It wasn’t that they disliked the caretaker; rather, they instinctively felt a touch of fear. This wasn’t solely due to the eerie atmosphere surrounding the cemetery; it was also because of the old man’s cold and reclusive nature. Even when compared to other caretakers in the cemetery, who were also somewhat gloomy, this old man from Cemetery No. 3 was the most intimidating.

He had been at this post for so long that he seemed to have absorbed some of the “aura” of the dead.

This even led to terrifying rumors—people often claimed to see pale lights floating above the cemetery fence at night, suggesting the caretaker’s soul had already left his body. Others said that the frightening old man would lie down in a coffin at midnight, stopping his breath to join the dead, only to awaken when the sun rose the next day.

These eerie and horrifying rumors surrounded the cemetery and its caretaker, but the reclusive and eccentric old man seemed to have never cared. In fact, he hardly interacted with the nearby residents, spending most of his time in the caretaker’s cottage within the cemetery, only occasionally venturing out to purchase daily necessities like he did today.

Naturally, he saw nothing wrong with this.

Keeping the living away from the world of the dead, ensuring the former didn’t harbor excessive curiosity to avoid harm, and allowing the latter to rest in peace was his responsibility.

He guarded the cemetery, as well as the city outside it.

The old man looked up at the cemetery gate not far away and suddenly stopped.

Today’s situation seemed a bit unusual.

There was a small visitor.