Sword of Dawnbreaker

Chapter 1240: Chapter 1239: Return and the Distant Horizons

Before the mountain-high throne, the silhouette of the uninvited guest vanished in an instant amid the suddenly surging gray-white sand and dust, dissipating like an illusion. The Black Leather Tome lying quietly on the stone pillar seemed stunned for a few seconds; only when the wind rose again did Wilder’s slightly bewildered murmur come from within the book: "It felt like there was someone here just now..."

As soon as he finished, a slightly lazy yet imposing voice came from high above: "What did you say, Mr. Great Adventurer?"

At these words, Wilder "looked" toward the throne before him. On that towering, lofty throne, Lady Night, dressed in a long gown as black as the night sky, was sitting there in a lazy posture. Gray-white vein-like cracks quietly curled at the hem of her dress.

"Ah, Lady Night, you’re back?" Wilder asked on instinct. "Where did you just go?"

"Me? I’ve been here the whole time, just took a little nap," Lady Night replied unhurriedly. "Great Adventurer, did you fall asleep just now as well? Why do I feel you’re speaking a bit strangely?"

"I... might have had a dream?" The voice from within the Black Leather Tome carried obvious confusion. "I’m not sure... I seemed to see a visitor who had stumbled into this place, and I said something to her. She seemed to be a very interesting girl, but she suddenly vanished. I can’t even remember the details of our conversation... I even saw the throne standing empty, with you nowhere to be found—I thought you’d gone to the border to deal with that fellow again."

"Then it seems you really did sleep yourself silly, Mr. Great Adventurer," Lady Night’s voice held a hint of amusement. "It’s not so easy for ’guests’ to show up here. If a sapient being’s mind really did accidentally fall into this place, I would definitely notice it immediately..."

Then the mistress of shadow manipulation paused for a moment, before speaking again with a trace of anticipation: "If I remember correctly, it’s your turn to tell a story this time... Can we continue the one from last time? The one about the ice river flowing beneath the magma, and the elves within the ice river..."

Wilder’s voice sounded a bit helpless: "Lady, although I’m very happy that you like my stories so much, could you perhaps appreciate those that are a bit more logical and rigorous? Even I feel that the story of magma, ice rivers, and elves is outrageously absurd... If it really won’t do, I can make up a new one for you?"

Lady Night laughed, and her laughter seemed capable of driving away the eternal, chaotic gloom hanging over this desert’s sky. She bowed her head, like a cloud that covered the land suddenly lowering itself. Deep in that vast, distant, nebulous shadow, Wilder saw a pair of amber eyes—filled with mirth yet carrying majesty—looking down on him.

"Mr. Great Adventurer, I’ve already seen far too many stories that are logical and rigorous. In such a boring place, it’s the absurd and preposterous that’s truly interesting, isn’t it?"

...

Amber jolted awake. She opened her eyes and realized that the hard feeling beneath her body was no illusion—she was lying flat on her back on the room’s floor, staring at the ceiling. That familiar chair lay overturned not far away; it seemed she had fallen off the chair, and in the process of falling had slipped into a bizarre dream. That brief instant had been magnified in the dream into several hours of adventure and a strange conversation, and then as her body hit the floor, she was jarred awake from the dreams.

"So falling is the shortcut to waking up from dreams..." Amber couldn’t help recalling what she’d heard before that throne, but soon her attention was drawn to the sunlight streaming into the room through a gap in the curtains—she still remembered clearly that when she first started studying those grains of sand, it had been a bright, sunny afternoon outside. Yet now... the light spilling into the room carried the golden hue of approaching dusk.

"Looks like those several hours of experience were real—at least, the flow of time was real..." Amber rubbed her temple, trying to clear her slightly muddled head as quickly as possible. "So I got squeezed out from ’over there’, huh?"

Muttering under her breath, she used her own voice as a way to prod her mind into waking up faster. But the next second, she seemed to sense something unusual; her gaze suddenly dropped to her fingertips.

A few fine grains of sand had scattered around the section of floor her fingertips were touching. Every grain was covered with a gray-white hue that felt as if it didn’t belong to this world. A kind of diluted gray-white texture spread out from those grains, "staining" a large patch of the originally dark-brown floor.

"...Holy shit..." Amber’s eyes widened at once as she realized that her little game of courting death might have gone way too far this time. But as she stared fixedly at those grains of sand, a strange sense of "connection" suddenly rose from the depths of her heart, making her feel that the sand scattered on the floor wasn’t just a pile of dead matter, but rather... like an extension of a part of her own power.

She kept her eyes locked on the sand, feeling out that faint "connection" emerging within. It was a very subtle sensation, somewhat like her usual perception of the shadow realm, yet more concrete and much clearer. She even felt she could control every single grain of dust, that she could even...

She gave a light snap of her fingers, and the sand on the floor vanished in an instant like a fading dream. The gray-white "wash" that had appeared on the floor gradually receded, returning to normal bit by bit.

Amber opened her mouth, then looked down at her own fingers, as if unable to believe what had just happened. Then she wore a thoughtful expression, and only after a long stretch of contemplation and sensing did she reach out again and rub her fingers together lightly—a stream of gray-white flowing sand surfaced in midair like water, falling to the floor with a soft rustling. The more the sand gathered, the more that gray-white "domain" spread, quickly extending across the entire room...

"Ah crap, that’s bad..." Amber snapped back to her senses at once, hurriedly cutting off the summoning of sand, then frantically "drawing" it back again. Fortunately, nothing unexpected happened in the process, and after half a minute the room gradually returned to normal.

Once everything had settled down, Amber sat on the floor, still a little dazed. She stayed like that, thinking in place for who knew how long, before finally slapping her thigh: "Hey, I really am badass now!"

Right after, she sprang up from the floor, rushing excitedly toward the door: "I’ve gotta go show off to that old man about this..."

She charged up to the door in a whirlwind, but just as she was about to push it open and step out, she suddenly froze, as if remembering something. She forced down the excitement bubbling in her chest while muttering to herself: "No, no, I’d better run a few more tests first, figure out exactly what this thing is. And more importantly, intel—I need information on that book that calls itself Wilder..."

...

The cold wind swept across the desolate wasteland beneath the night sky, and the chill of starlight that had endured for hundreds of millions of years shone upon this land as ancient as the stars themselves. Aunt Victoria stood atop the towering ramparts of New Argondale; she looked inward, towards the city within the high walls, where rugged and magnificent houses stood in dense rows, and lights of all sizes illuminated this lonely fortress that sheltered all living beings in the frozen winter night. Then she turned her gaze outward, beyond the walls, and saw the wilds stretching away beneath the starry sky, war‑scarred burns scattered across the undulating ground. Everything in the distance seemed to have been swallowed by darkness and cold, and only the shattered silhouettes of colossal factories and palatial structures silently spoke of Talronde’s splendor in days long past.

The world beyond the city walls looked bleak and devoid of hope, yet in the few days she had lived here Aunt Victoria had already learned that the sunken ruins in that darkness were not truly empty—scattered, feeble lights flickered in the depths of the night, and between those points of light one could occasionally glimpse dragons skimming across the star‑strewn firmament. In those places where the lamps shone, the Dragonkin had dug from the ruins certain old factories that could still be coaxed into motion, or forward outposts used to monitor the borders of the safety zones. Even beneath those ruins, in the underground, the Dragonkin were straining every nerve to clear the collapsed subterranean transit networks and storage facilities. Their labors did not cease, day or night.

This inevitably made Aunt Victoria think of those ancient years recorded in the books, of how the pioneers of the Anzu Kingdom once toiled at the edge of the wasteland, building and opening up the land with meager means; it also drew her thoughts to that stretch of wasteland south of the Dark Mountain Range, and to the series of plans the King had devised to counterattack and reclaim the wasteland—plans that, in the not‑too‑distant future, would turn into real action.

Just then, a gentle voice with a hint of laughter suddenly came from beside her, breaking the duchess’s train of thought: "Forgive me, Victoria, dragging you out for a ’walk’ in a place this cold—keeping an old man company while he lets the wind lash him atop the city wall can’t be all that entertaining, can it?"

Aunt Victoria awoke from her reverie and saw the old man in a black soft cap and black magic robe standing next to her, smiling with narrowed eyes as he watched her. She quickly shook her head. "Of course not, please don’t think that way—I very much enjoy walking with you."

"Really?" Modir was plainly a little skeptical. "Young folk don’t usually have that kind of patience. On ordinary days, when I look for someone to listen to my adventures, they scatter faster than anyone."

"That only shows how shallow their horizons are," Aunt Victoria said at once, then made an effort to arrange her face into what she hoped was a smile—she thought she had succeeded, because her ancestor’s expression clearly brightened as well. "As for me... in truth, it has been a long time since I’ve had such leisure. To be able, as I am now, to lay aside my work for a while and accompany you out here for a casual walk—this is, for me, a rare rest and relaxation."

"Sounds like your work is usually quite heavy," Modir nodded, then looked somewhat worried. "If you’re away for so long, won’t things at work be delayed?"

"I... applied for leave from my superiors before I left," Aunt Victoria hurried to explain; in a certain sense, she was not lying with these words. "I’ve already arranged for colleagues and subordinates to handle my tasks. Being away for a while won’t hold anything up."

"Then that’s all right." Modir chuckled and, as always, did not pry into the exact nature of Aunt Victoria’s "work." Aunt Victoria seized the chance to steer the topic away: "Have you, in these last two days, been troubled again by that ’dream’?"

"These past two days have been fine; I haven’t had that ’strange dream,’" Modir shook his head. "Maybe having you nearby really is helping? But then again, that ’dream’ wasn’t happening every day to begin with. From the time I boarded that mechanical ship up until now, I’ve only had three instances of those dreams in total—not what you’d call frequent. It’s just that the dreams themselves are a bit frightening."

"Even so, you mustn’t relax your guard," Aunt Victoria said with a grave expression. "Those dreams clearly point to a power related to the gods. With such forces, the moment you grow careless even once, it often means an irredeemable catastrophe..."

"All right, all right, I know, I know," Modir said, waving his hand. His expression looked somewhat peculiar as he couldn’t help running his eyes up and down Aunt Victoria. "Did you get this temperament from your father? How is it that at such a young age you seem even more stiff and solemn than this old man of yours..."

A hint of embarrassment finally flickered in Aunt Victoria’s gaze. She clearly lacked experience in this kind of conversation and could only bite the bullet. "I... have always been this way, and my father’s temperament is indeed much the same. In fact, a rigorous style of conduct has long been a tradition in our family..."

"A family tradition?" Modir couldn’t help batting his eyelids, pointing at himself in surprise. "Is that tradition something I passed down?"

Aunt Victoria’s expression did not change much, but something stirred within her. She suddenly recalled a few awkward remarks Amber had once made in idle chatter—about ’their own ancestral founder not abiding by the ancestral precepts.’ She thought to herself that she had finally encountered something similar, yet that faint sigh did not slow her response. Faced with her ancestor’s curious look, she quickly spoke: "That... should be from an even earlier ancestor, and according to the clan records, your temperament doesn’t quite match this tradition..."

"Then that’s a relief." At this, Modir immediately patted his chest. "I was afraid I might once have been a stiff, old‑fashioned sort. If that were true, it would be a little terrifying—an adventure life lived with a perpetual scowl would be dreadfully dull."

Watching her ancestor’s somewhat exaggerated reaction, Aunt Victoria truly did not know what expression she ought to wear for a moment. Then, remembering that she normally didn’t manage much expression at all, she let it go and asked with a touch of curiosity, "Why do you like roaming about on adventures so much?"

As soon as her words fell, a sudden hush settled over the ramparts. Modir did not answer at once; it was as though the question had stirred up a tangle of thoughts. Only after pondering in silence for a time whose length neither of them could measure did he finally break the quiet. "Don’t you feel curious? About those unknown realms, unknown things, unknown knowledge... Don’t you feel curious at all? Our world is so vast, and the more you go to explore its limits, the more you sense that those ’limits’ still lie beyond your comprehension. In such a boundless expanse, to keep discovering things that none of our predecessors ever found... Don’t you see the delight in that?"

Aunt Victoria parted her lips. Her ancestor’s answer did not truly surprise her; countless records about this Great Adventurer, and many remarks he had left six hundred years ago, had long been preserved in the family tomes, and she was well acquainted with them all. Yet looking into the light shining out from the Great Adventurer’s eyes, she still couldn’t help saying, "Have you ever considered that these adventures may one day cost you your life? And now, you are entangled in the power of gods... it may very well be a ’sequel’ from some past adventure..."

"Ahaha, child, show a little confidence and take that ’may very well’ out," Modir suddenly laughed. "A fellow like me, who kicks up trouble everywhere he goes, is certainly not going to die peacefully at home in his bed. The odd entanglements I run into from time to time are most assuredly the extra ’gifts’ from delving into unknown realms—girl, you needn’t remind me. On this point, I’m far clearer than you are."

Aunt Victoria seemed unable to comprehend this almost obsessive ’hobby’ of the old man; she couldn’t help saying, "Then you..."

"Then I will continue to go out, yes, I will continue to go out," Modir said with a gentle smile, his gaze turning toward the darkness in the distance, to the deepest part of the wilds that lay beyond the limits of sight. "I have no lofty reason, and I’m not doing it to push back the frontiers of civilization—for truth be told, I’ve never thought about such things. I merely feel that... this polar night, for instance—if this endless night were never to end, and human beings, living as short‑lived insects beneath this shroud of sky, were to spend their entire lives upon their homeland, then they would never see the sky beyond the night. But if we go out and walk, no matter which direction we take, if we walk farther, we can see the sunrise, see the sun climbing into the sky...

"Many little insects may feel that this isn’t much to fuss over, but the sun... it is truly out there."