The speed of the Brilliant Star gradually decreased, and finally it cautiously stopped on the sea surface several hundred meters away from the translucent "cliff" emitting a faint glow.

However, the distance of several hundred meters was so insignificant compared to the scale of that huge monster. From a visual point of view, Luni still felt that the Brilliant Star seemed to have already approached the "cliff". The magnificent geometric body in front of her, like a mountain, was almost rushing towards her with a crushing momentum. If an ordinary person stood here... he would probably have felt suffocated.

"...It's really spectacular," the clockwork puppet couldn't help but look up and exclaim, "and it's very beautiful."

That thing is indeed spectacular and beautiful. If you ignore its weirdness, it can even be regarded as a magnificent wonder, enough to inspire an excellent artist's greatest inspiration in his life, or let a poet write countless poems for this wonder.

It is like a sharp-edged mountain carved from light golden and clear amber, or an exceptionally regular piece of geometric floating ice. It emits a hazy light mist and floats in the water. The surrounding thin mist slowly floats around its surface, outlining a dreamy atmosphere.

And all signs indicate that this thing is indeed like a "dream" - it has no entity, and although it is indeed there, it seems to be just a shadow of huge scale.

"Madam," Luni couldn't help but turn her head, "What do you think this is?"

"...I don't know. I only know that it fell from the sky." Lucrecia frankly admitted her ignorance. She recalled the scene when the Brilliant Star first tracked this thing - just the day before yesterday, in the last few hours of the day, the Brilliant Star observed a huge and hazy luminous object suddenly falling from the sky, tearing through the clouds and disappearing into the depths of the border sea. Since then, she and her ship have been tracking this thing.

But apart from the obvious fact that he "fell from the sky", she knew nothing about this phantom alien visitor.

Lucrecia carefully observed the bottom of the huge geometric object and confirmed another thing:

This thing is very light, very, very light. It floats on the sea, and the lower part only sinks slightly into the water. But even that slight sign of sinking into the water shows that this thing that looks like a "phantom" also has some mass, and is not just a simple shadow.

Having some mass means that it can be bound by real matter... With the power of the Brilliant Star, perhaps it can even tow this thing away?

Can we drag it back to the borders of the civilized world and organize a real professional team to study it? The Explorers' Association should be happy to help...

But this is the theory, but how to do it in practice? How can you drag a huge, penetrable phantom? Or... is there a solid core deep inside this glowing geometric object, and the core structure is the source of its mass?

Lucrecia was thinking quickly in her mind, and Luni's voice sounded beside her: "Should we explore its interior?"

"Proceed with caution first." Lucrecia said, raising her hand and biting her finger. A drop of blood oozed out from her fingertips, then slowly floated forward, and when it was halfway there, it suddenly exploded with a "bang" and turned into an exaggerated cloud of smoke.

When the smoke cleared, another "Lucretia" appeared in the cab - but it was just a ghostly phantom, wearing a pale and tattered long dress, with a dull and gloomy face, a translucent texture all over the body, floating eerily in the air.

Lucrecia nodded to the phantom, and the latter turned around without saying a word and flew towards the "mountain" hundreds of meters away.

Luni watched this scene a little nervously, watching the ghostly phantom quickly cross the misty sea and disappear silently into the "mountain".

Nothing happened.

"Mistress?" Luni turned back to look at her master, "What's in there?"

"The light and heat are warm, but not scorching; bright, but not blinding... There is no wind or waves inside, and the sea below seems to be even calmer than outside," Lucrecia said slowly while carefully sensing the information from her phantom clone. "It seems that at least the shallow area of ​​the mountain is safe now. I am speeding up to move inside."

Luni nodded. Even though she was just a clockwork puppet, she had a "soul" that was closer to that of a human being than any other crew member on the ship. At this moment, she couldn't help feeling nervous. She reached behind her back and turned her clockwork key twice, using this method to relieve the slight trembling of various parts of her body caused by tension. Then she waited for a long time before she suddenly saw the hostess's expression change.

Lucrecia frowned slightly and looked forward.

"I have reached the deepest part," said the "sea witch," and there is a core."

"Core? What kind?"

"It's a huge stone ball," Lucrecia said with a strange expression, "or at least it looks like stone. It's grayish white with many regular grooves on the surface. It's about ten meters in diameter and is suspended above the sea..."

As she spoke, Lucrecia frowned and concentrated, as if she was giving some orders to the ghostly phantom that had already entered the depths of the glowing geometric body. Then she continued, "You can touch it. It's a solid entity."

"It's a physical entity..." Lu Ni was stunned for a moment. Her years of experience allowed her to quickly understand what the mistress meant. "You want to... drag it back?"

"The elf scholars in Breeze Harbor should be interested in this thing," Lucrecia said calmly. "The patterns on the surface of the stone ball have obvious rules and imply a complex geometric structure. I guess... people who are good at mathematics should be able to figure out something from it."

"Then how are we going to 'drag' this thing back?" Luni looked at her mistress in surprise. "Use a strong enough rope or chain? There is a spare anchor cable on the ship, but it may not be long enough - the projection of the luminous object is too large, and the distance from here to its core may exceed the limit of the anchor cable..."

Lucrecia stared at the glowing "mountain" in silence. Half a minute later, she seemed to have made up her mind: "Let's go in and pull it."

"…Are you serious?"

"I got curious."

"…Okay, you're serious."

※※※

Duncan was sleeping in the captain's bedroom of the Lost Homeland and had a short and bizarre dream.

This was incredible. His body didn't even need sleep, let alone dream. In fact, he had never had the experience of "dreaming" since he came to this ship. He had some messy and trivial dreams in Plande's body, but they had never been as clear and impressive as this short and strange dream.

In his dream, he saw a shooting star, a meteor that appeared suddenly in the daytime.

He stood at the bow of the Homeless. The ship was dead silent. He could neither hear the goat-head chattering in his mind nor the noise of Alice's daily fights with buckets and mops on the deck. Even the entire vast ocean was silent, with no waves or wind.

The whole world seemed to have fallen into dead silence, and in this silence, a huge luminous object fell from the sky - also silently.

The luminous bodies fell one after another onto the calm surface of the Boundless Ocean. Although they were extremely large falling objects, they did not cause any movement at all, as if a phantom fell on another phantom. Gradually, those luminous bodies began to fall like rain, and eventually turned into a terrifying and bizarre meteor shower. Countless luminous bodies gradually covered the entire sea surface, surrounding the Lost Hometown in a radiance.

However, the sky gradually dimmed as countless light bodies fell. At the end of the dream, the meteor shower gradually stopped and the sky turned pitch black.

At the end of the dream, Duncan looked up and saw only a dark red and mottled terrifying hole in the sky, as if there was a fire still burning in the darkness, quietly overlooking everything in the world like a dying eye.

Duncan suddenly opened his eyes, the deep impression left by the absurd dream still lingering strongly in his mind.

He was shocked that he was dreaming on a boat, and even more shocked by the strange scene he saw in his dream.

A silent world, silent meteors, a dark and dead sky, and a terrifying void that looked down upon the world like an eye pupil... Why did he dream of such a strange scene? What did this dream mean? !

Duncan slowly calmed down his breath, sat up from the bed, and rubbed his forehead in annoyance.

In this strange and boundless sea, on the Lost Homeland, he couldn't believe that the dream was just a simple dream - there must be something that had an impact on him, or his "intuition" must have foreseen something, which made him see that scene in his dream.

He frowned slightly in his irritable thoughts.

Could it be related to the "world countdown" that he had just learned about? Or was it related to the "truth" about the end of the world that the crazy "Captain Duncan" had come into contact with a hundred years ago?

Was it because I suddenly learned about this information and made this association, or was it because the memories left in this body suddenly became agitated? Was my contact with Tirian and Lucrecia related to this dream?

Duncan tapped his forehead lightly, and reached out to the wine bottle on the cabinet next to him, ready to use the power of alcohol to calm his mood, but just as he stretched out his hand, his eyes swept across the wall clock not far away, and his action stopped.

The hands on the wall clock stopped.

Stand still at the moment one minute before sunrise.

It was dark outside the window. I couldn't see the glow of dawn, but there was also no cool light brought by the creation of the world.

The flame of the oil lamp in the bedroom was the only "moving thing" that was still burning peacefully, but the light it emitted was faintly pale, making the lighting in the entire room seem a little weird.

Duncan looked at it all calmly, taking in all the unusual phenomena.

Something was clearly not right... Was I still dreaming?

He quickly ruled out this possibility - after regaining consciousness, he could still tell whether he was dreaming or not.

Duncan frowned, resisted the urge to open the window and take a look outside the ship, and instead stood up and walked towards the wooden door of the bedroom.

First go to the chart room and see if Goat Head knows what's going on.

He pushed open the door leading to the chart room and looked at the navigation table with the nautical chart and goat's head on it.

The goat's head wasn't there.