Sword of Dawnbreaker

Chapter 1286: Chapter 1285: The Convergence Point of Clues

A sound like some kind of mechanical locking device activating rose up from deep beneath the ground. The automatically running ship and the automatically running Mother Harbor completed their docking, and after the two sheets of Steel Ground were joined together, everyone heard the deep humming from the depths of the ancient ship beneath their feet gradually weaken—as if the ship’s systems were switching into a sleep mode and beginning to accept resupply and inspection from the Mother Harbor.

After setting down the "passengers" from her back, Melita Ponia stepped through a flutter of light and reverted to her human being form. She looked toward the area a hundred meters ahead—the original edge of the ship, which was now connected to the harbor of the Mother Harbor. The ship’s barrier at the corresponding position had also fused with the Harbor’s own barrier. What spread out before her eyes now was a broad, unobstructed avenue, leading straight onto that "Mother Harbor" that was almost like an artificial continent in its own right.

"Are we going to land over there and take a look now?" She turned her head to glance at Gawain beside her. "It’s just that we have no idea how long this ship will stay here. If it suddenly leaves while we’re ashore exploring..."

"It will remain for at least twelve hours." Gawain cut her off with a slight shake of his head. He raised his gaze to the junction where ship and harbor were connected: a massive holographic projection stretched across the deck and the docking aperture. On that projection, a string of characters flashed and pulsed. The others couldn’t make sense of it, but he could see it clearly—it was the progress display for the ship receiving engine calibration and barrier charging at the harbor. Judging from it, although the main systems here had already been destroyed, just as the lighting facilities everywhere were still functioning, part of the basic functions of the "Mother Harbor" were still operating normally—though it was obvious they too had suffered various levels of damage.

The group had grown accustomed to Gawain’s "familiarity" with these Voyager relics, so no one raised any questions. Upon learning that they had twelve hours of operational time, everyone immediately stopped wasting time and followed Gawain toward the vast "Mother Harbor" in the distance.

Enormous dried branches, broken vines, and leaves so large they were almost the size of roofs lay scattered around them. The "Reincarnation Giant Tree," bigger than an entire city, sprawled at a tilt over the distant harbor facilities. Its crown, stripped bare of leaves and left with only mangled branches, was like a web of interlaced, ferocious iron forming a Firmament overhead. Merely looking at it filled one with a tremendous sense of awe and oppression—everyone’s gaze could not help but be drawn upward to that canopy, which blanketed the entire harbor. Mary, the timid and soft‑natured one of the group, even began to tremble, until Daniel, unable to bear the sight, cast a powerful Soothing Spell on his apprentice. Only then did the poor young Mage finally calm down.

Gawain was also gazing up at the crown of the Reincarnation Giant Tree, at those dried branches faintly woven into the outline of a giant city. He pictured the moment this kingdom collided with this Voyager relic, and he couldn’t help but feel a certain admiration for Amon’s feat back then. Yet no matter what, this magnificent divine tree had, in the end, died—withered in this dark, deep, silent ruin, its remains scattered in fragments across the place. And whether it was the pollution of the Inversion Tide or something else... it no longer had anything to do with this dead tree.

"Looks like just as with the War God’s Divine Realm, the ’Reincarnation Giant Tree’ doesn’t have any contaminating effect on us either," said Kamel, floating near Gawain. He lifted his arm and directed The Sculpture Hand to gather some of the dried plant fragments and place them in a small box floating behind him as samples to take back. "I just wonder whether these things will ’dissipate’ into nothing in the mortal world the same way things from the War God’s Divine Realm did..."

"Amon’s separation from his divine seat happened over three thousand years ago. Although his initial detachment wasn’t as thorough as the War God’s, after such a long time, the divine influence he left behind should have dispersed completely," Gawain replied offhand. "Moreover, even if the divinity on his own person hadn’t completely faded, his kingdom couldn’t possibly still be harboring any mental pollution—this is a relic left by the Voyagers. Any gods’ relics that fall upon it will be ’purified to safe and harmless’ in an instant."

"Purified, huh..." Melita Ponia swept her gaze around, thoughtful. "Perhaps this Reincarnation Giant Tree died in the process of being purified, killed by a kind of ’rejection reaction’. Look at those massive vines—some of them show signs of trying to wrap around the surrounding facilities, but they withered and died mid‑coiling. That suggests the tree was at least still alive when it first ’crashed’ into this place. Unfortunately, faced with the power of the Voyagers... it barely even got the chance to struggle."

Gawain did not speak. His gaze fell on an alloy tower at the harbor’s edge, where withered vines had coiled and died, yet deep within that tangle of remains, tiny leaves and flowers were sprouting, stubbornly showing traces of life in this desolate, dead place—and these small plants could be seen everywhere among the more distant remains of the giant tree.

They had even faintly formed a small ecosystem.

Modir was also intrigued by these plants growing out of the giant tree’s remains. The instincts of a Great Adventurer led him to ignore the eerie, oppressive atmosphere here. He stepped into the vast plant carcasses, clambered up dried branches and dead vines, and carefully studied the vegetation growing among them. Then he turned back to the others and said, "These things don’t look like the plants of our ’mortal world’, but besides that, they don’t seem to have any special traits..."

"They appear to be nothing more than common flowers and shrubs, sprouting from what remains after the death of divinity, yet themselves are merely mortal things," Melita Ponia likewise examined the plants emerging from the remains of the Reincarnation Giant Tree and came to a conclusion. "In essence, the Reincarnation Giant Tree is still just a ’tree’. Once stripped of its divinity and killed, it would still retain massive nutrients. Those nutrients would be enough for it to germinate new ’offspring’ from its own corpse, even sustaining a small‑scale ecosystem... It’s just that three thousand years have passed; who knows how much longer the life in this corpse can keep going."

No one could answer Melita Ponia’s question. It was likely that even if Amon himself came here, he wouldn’t be able to explain it clearly. All they could do was observe their surroundings as meticulously as possible, constantly record image data, collect as many samples as they could, and, in the process, keep pace with Gawain’s steps as they continued deeper into the harbor.

They reached the area beneath the giant tree’s canopy, where the colossal plant remains around them peaked in density—countless roots, vines, branches, leaves, and deadwood fragments covered the Steel Ground, some even piled into little hills and ravines. A few dry vines hung down from the canopy, intertwined like a forest, and the surface of those vines was overgrown with fresh "offspring" ivy. Death and withering intertwined with new greenery in an uncanny way, and beneath this wondrous scene of life and death interwoven lay the cold, unyielding Steel Ground left behind by the Voyagers one million eight hundred thousand years ago.

Much of the original harbor structure had been buried under the remains of the Reincarnation Giant Tree. Only a few hovering light‑orb streetlamps still functioned as usual, illuminating this "dense forest" that should have been shrouded in deep gloom. Gawain led his team through this forest, and luckily, every member of the group possessed a certain level of power, so the harsh environment here did little to impair their progress.

Amber’s figure moved at the very front of the group. Though this disgrace of the alliance had been acting the whole way as if she were scared to death and cowardly to the core, she was far from unreliable when it came time to actually do her job. With her extraordinary agility she served as scout ahead, her petite silhouette flickering through light and shadow among the trees, constantly bringing information from the path ahead back to Gawain’s side.

Like a speed‑boosted eye‑bug.

A slightly ridiculous association flashed in his mind, and Gawain promptly shook off those stray thoughts. Just then, Amber—who had gone ahead to scout the surroundings—suddenly ran back again, and her face was contorted in an expression of exaggerated shock, as if she’d just seen Rebecca practicing flower arranging.

"You guys have to come see this!!" The half-elf shot toward them like a gust of wind, words rattling out of her mouth in a rapid, loud stream. "Up ahead... there’s something up ahead! I thought I was seeing things! In the clearing up front..."

Walking at the head of the group, Gawain was momentarily taken aback by Amber’s sudden dramatic outburst. Then he casually brushed her aside, lengthened his stride toward the front, and said as he went, "Don’t be so jumpy. What exactly is up ahead..."

He hadn’t finished speaking when he stepped over a wall‑high swell of dark brown dead vines. The view, previously blocked by plant remains, opened up, and the scene not far ahead filled his eyes—forcing all the words he’d been about to say right back down his throat.

Footsteps sounded from behind, and the rest of the party hurried up from the rear. In that instant, Gawain heard several low exclamations and sharp intakes of breath—their gazes were all fixed, stunned, on the open ground not far away, on the stretch of clearing where there quietly stood... a small wooden cabin.

A small wooden cabin!

"A house?!" Even Daniel, who had kept a stiff face the whole time, lost his composure for a moment. He stared wide-eyed at that unadorned little cabin in the distance.

The cabin was obviously built from materials gathered on the spot nearby. Roughly worked planks and vines, though hardly pretty, looked solid and durable. It stood in an open area amid the Reincarnation Giant Tree’s remnants, with nothing blocking the surroundings—apparently to avoid having dead branches and fallen leaves from the treetop crash down on the house. Not far from the cabin, among the coiled and piled-up plant remains, one could see thick clusters of berry bushes and other plants of indeterminate species that had grown together untended. Unlike the wild vegetation elsewhere, those shrubs seemed to have been carefully cultivated at some point—the remnants of fences and crooked wooden posts were still visible around them.

Yet all of this looked long abandoned.

"These are... traces of someone having lived here!" Victoria couldn’t help breaking the silence. She looked, astonished, at everything in the near distance, then turned to her ancestor, the Great Adventurer. "Ancestor, you... Ancestor? What’s wrong?"

Modir stood beside Victoria, his expression having gone oddly vacant at some point. The old Mage stared dazedly at the cabin and the scene around it. It was a long moment before he seemed to finally hear Victoria calling him. He pressed a hand to his forehead, muttering in confusion, "I... I don’t know... I feel like I’ve been to this place before, but I’ve forgotten. I’ve forgotten something important... It’s like I..."

Modir’s reaction made something jolt in Gawain’s mind, a chain of lightning-quick associations flaring up in his thoughts. At the same time, Amber, who had been scanning the surroundings, suddenly discovered something else. She grabbed his arm, shouting, "Hey! Look over there! Look farther out! Those tower-like constructs and the structures that connect them!"

Gawain blinked and slowly followed the direction of Amber’s pointing finger with his gaze.

He saw, at some distance from the cabin, another, even broader clearing. Numerous alloy structures like towers stretched up from the Steel Ground platforms, rising straight toward the sky. Between those alloy "towers" ran cleverly arranged beams and arches, intertwining to form a huge three-dimensional construct that looked at once like an antenna array and a purely ornamental dome. All of this was half-shrouded by nearby plant remains, so much so that he hadn’t even noticed their existence at first glance.

He stared in that direction for a long time before pulling his gaze back to meet Amber’s eyes. The two of them looked at each other for two or three seconds, then spoke in unison: "A scene from the dust illusion!"

It was the very place shown in the "illusion" Amber had drawn from the depths of Modir’s memory, the place where Modir had met the "Twin Elves."

So it was here, in the depths of the deep-sea, within the Voyager’s Mother Harbor, amid the ruined remnants of the Reincarnation Giant Tree!

Here, many threads of clue quietly came together at last, revealing an "answer" none of them had anticipated. Even Gawain himself was taken aback by the dramatic convergence of these clues. His gaze slowly shifted to the small wooden cabin on the clearing ahead—that simple, unadorned dwelling... which at this moment seemed to have become the focal point and core of all things, stirring ancient truths and future possibilities alike.

"Victoria, look after Modir," Gawain said to the "Ice and Snow Duchess" beside him. Then he stepped toward the silent little cabin. Behind him, Amber wordlessly followed of her own accord.

Gawain came to stand before the cabin, and the humble dwelling offered him only silence in return. No sound came from within; it seemed that whoever had once lived here had departed long ago. He reached out, slowly running his hand over the rough wooden door. Fashioned from Divine Wood Remnants, the door was weathered, yet still whole and sturdy.

He saw faint carvings on the door. Brushing away the dust on the surface, he finally made out what they were—not anything earthshaking, just simple line drawings of plants and animals, and a few plain yet vivid landscapes.

Gawain drew in a quiet breath and pushed the door open.

The interior of the cabin unfolded before his eyes, all humble furnishings laid bare—two old, simple wooden beds, some wooden shelves and household utensils, and in one corner a low wooden table, upon which rested several bouquets that had been dry for an unknown number of years.

Gawain’s gaze slowly swept across the room.

He saw no living souls, but neither did he see any bones.

He saw only a central pillar in the cabin, with fresh green vines winding their way up along it. At the end of the vines, two small, pink-and-white twin flowers swayed faintly, and around the pillar, at the base of the vines, lay several scraps of clothing already weathered and crumbled to pieces.