A deep, long place without light.

He walked in the endless corridor, the rock wall was dry and rough, and the darkness was thick and solid.

There are no lamps and torches in his empty hands, and his eyes are invisible, but he doesn't seem to need the guidance of vision, just instinctively walks forward.

There was an icy air current blowing in my ears, from the infinite depths, and even the strength of the clothes could not be shaken, but it brought a slight tremor of the stone wall, and the rock formations trembled like scattered leaves with the arrival of the cold current.

Something is approaching, the cold snap is its long, long breath, the vibration is its pace.

Rocky scales, long link-like bodies, and willed ridges that pass through the darkness, make the rock formations tremble and rapidly approach.

The structure between the valve and the chelicerae is open, and countless blurred faces are adhered to, hill dwellers, sailors, and faces burned by acid, warts and blister-like chimeras clustered in the interstitial spaces of the rock crust, and microarthropods manipulate flattened and pale smiles.

The tremors threw the gravel, the cold grew and rushed, the fear clenched the heart, squeezed the blood, the steep rise in blood pressure caused a dull pain in the back of the orbit, and the adequate supply of oxygen made the brain wake up from the fog and realize the current situation.

Having no time to think about where you are and why you are there, when there is nowhere to hide, the subconscious mind makes reflex actions based on existing experience.

……

"Bang!"

Tables and chairs shifted, uncapped inkwells were swept away, and slightly viscous black liquid poured onto the table, seeping into the messed manuscript and spreading from page to page.

The dark black fades away, crawling along the messy pressed fibers, quickly eating into the gothic-like title, swallowing the introduction, and moving towards the main text of the glyph.

The newly awakened brain interrupted the previous process between scene changes, reloaded the content relevant to the situation in front of him, and watched the ink contaminate a corner of the desktop before reacting.

"Oops." Kraft hurriedly removed the rest of the paper, and some of the handwriting that had not been completely dried in the hurry was printed on the fully dried manuscript paper, mixed with the loose pages with some ink in the corners.

The table full of manuscript paper became a mess, but fortunately the candlestick had long since been extinguished, and it did not fall down and ignite the paper.

Walking two steps around the table, some old planks groaned slightly underfoot, with a distinct hollow sound, suggesting that the cabin was below rather than a solid rock formation.

On the wall hangs a long wooden tube for the nautical charts, which is the captain's cabin of the Iceberg.

They marched through the hills for two weeks as fast as they could, returning to the ship with a resolute order to set sail. From evening to dusk, the sailors were summoned back to the ship from the tavern or the bed without any landing, and no one asked why the captain was reluctant to stay on land for an extra night.

There was also little discussion of those who did not return in the midst of the hasty sailing and busy river voyages, except for the first mate's habitual greeting of the young man named Walker, and bringing a drink to the captain who had not lowered his steering wheel all night.

Then he felt the inexplicable gaze under the brimmed three-cornered hat, as if accusing him of triggering taboo words at sea such as "drown" and "capsize" that would lead to doom.

A small box was taken out of the dark compartment and placed on the deck, the coins barely covering the bottom of the box, but the golden metallic sheen made Kraft look at it.

Rationally speaking, when many sailors consciously save money, it is not impossible to make up the silver coins of the Seven Kingdoms that can be exchanged for one gold coin, but the consumption habits make them not save this money, and the insecurity does not allow them to concentrate their entire wealth on a small thing that may be lost at any time.

For the vast majority of those who have never touched gold, the impact of this box is greater than anything else.

After William promised that half of the box would go to the people on board, and the other half would be handed over to the families of the deceased with their own eyes, the little dissent that was left to dare not discuss it on deck disappeared. From the moment the gold coins were in the pocket, the names of the three faces that reminded William would not sound in the most hidden wooden crevices of the ship.

Instead, there were rumors that the captain had actually found some kind of treasure, and that this rumor would spread immediately after disembarking was exactly what William needed.

After embarking on the ship, Kraft borrowed the only fixed square table on board to record the principles of acid production and the description of the experiment. The other is in the hands of the chef and is used to set up the soup pot and handle the occasional fresh meat. Recently, a new addition has been added: appreciating the gold coins that have just arrived.

"Is it another dream?"

For half a month, that strange oblivion didn't happen again, or happened somewhere no one noticed, and it seemed that the only point of its appearance was to let the wound fade away in the mind.

From time to time, nightmares became new troubles, mostly related to the experience of that night. Either you can't find a torch in the mine, or you're fighting with the arthropods that peek out of the darkness, and you're being chased by something.

The side effects of good memory are evident at this point, as he can't quickly forget about dreams when he wakes up, reacting with a frightened afterglow and getting through a difficult night.

This could easily have developed into "William is not sleeping".

After a few secondary awakenings, the captain preferred to abandon the comfortable bed in the captain's quarters, giving up the whole place to Kraft for the time being, and squeezing in with the first mate himself.

So Kraft was alone at night.

The bright white moonlight poured from the lattice window through the half-transparent curtains onto the table, not even if there was no candle lighting. He flipped through the manuscript in his hand, leaving no impression, but clearly realized that the work of half the night had become a pile of waste paper.

It was terrible, and Kraft stopped lighting the candle and walked to the bedside, ready to take a nap and resume his work tomorrow morning.

I also had to discuss with William how to use the information in his hands. Whether to build your own production workshop, or sell it to others to make a lot of quick money.

The former obviously have greater long-term monopoly interests, but in reality they do not have the ready-made industrial base and reliable manpower to do so, and they do not dare to continue mining from the remote mines in the southern hills. This makes everything from scale to confidentiality problematic.

Perhaps setting up the workshop on the territory of the Wood family can solve the problem to a certain extent, but the value of this technology is too great, and the secrecy is too poor. If it weren't for the fast death of the alchemist back then, and the fact that the origin was hidden and the survivors of the knowledge suffered a stroke, it would have been a matter of time before the craftsmanship was discovered. This time does not necessarily allow them to make enough money from scratch.

Another problem was that William began to refuse to go ashore, and only reluctantly docked at the strong request of the crew to replenish what had not been added after a hasty voyage, and refused to disembark himself. In this state, it is impossible to manage the onshore industry.

The latter does not have this kind of problem, and directly sells it to make a lot of money, and it is a big deal to find acquaintances or even churches to be intermediaries and notarizations. Take seventy percent of the unexpected joy, and take three percent is also a big profit.

Don't say anything unique about the glass wings, you just ask the bishop if he wants gold coins or the broken wings, right? Things are church's, money isn't.

It just so happened that Kraft wanted a large sum of money for equipment, experiments, books, and even for patients. If time is limited, money can be the catalyst for everything. William also showed a tendency to switch to a large ship that could be offshore for a long time.

Thinking of this, Kraft got up and left the bed, picked up the barrel of the pen, and leaned over the inkwell, wetting the nib of the unpoured bottom. pressed half of the torn waste paper on the table, intending to use the moonlight to list the pros and cons of the two, and take it directly to William tomorrow.

He sat down at the table, only to find that the table had fallen back into darkness, the light band illuminating the bedside, and the candlestick standing in the shadow of the window frame.

【Moonlight, Moving】

There was a banging sound outside the window, as if some polite sailor had entered on night duty and had heard the noise and came to inquire.

The damp, soft stuff clinged to the planks, caught in the sound of the waves outside the ship, where no one could stand, and the light was bright. Kraft stood up in shock and drew his sword, sticky memories of malice leaping from the tail vertebrae to the back of his head.

……

The hand lifted the sheets, and the body bounced violently. The interior is dimly lit. There is a strip-like hard object behind the pillow, which is a long sword that is put down before going to bed.

The windows were open, the evening breeze of water mixed with sand blew into the cabin, the yellowish yellow flowing under the not-so-bright moon, and the silent hills on the shore - the lackluster night view of the Tobid River, which sailed normally on the only waterway in the southern hills.

"Or is it a dream?"

(End of chapter)