Because of the delay in the afternoon, when Shirley and Nina returned to 99 Crown Street, it was almost dusk and time for dinner.
In this "City of Elves", there is not much that can be called normal food, but fortunately normal ingredients can always be bought. Lucrecia's "servants" prepared a sumptuous dinner for the guests, and Nina and Shirley finally ate "food that humans should eat."
But they all felt unsatisfied during this meal.
What they saw and heard in the underground containment facility still made them feel a little dizzy. There were too many things they didn't understand, too many things that were beyond their worldview, about the Great Annihilation, about the "black wall" at the starting point of history, about those doomsdays, about those destroyed old worlds, and this "new world" born in the deep sea era...
For two girls who could strictly speaking be considered “big kids”, these things were a bit too complicated and advanced.
After hurriedly finishing her dinner, Shirley returned to her room. She sat at the table in a daze for a while, then she heard the sound of chains shaking beside her, and Agou poked his head out from the shadows.
Shirley lowered her head, looked at this "friend" who had almost eaten her but raised her since she was a child, and asked seriously: "Did you understand everything the captain said today? What about the fragments of several worlds piled together and the deep sea era..."
"I can understand part of it," Agou lay down and gently rubbed Shirley's knees with his big head, "but I don't understand the parts that are too beyond common sense."
"I barely understood anything," Shirley said honestly. "Of course, I understood the sentences, but it was a bit difficult for me to imagine how those things happened. After all, why should we care about how the world was born?"
She said this in confusion. Even though she knew she was acting very shallow, she had nothing to hide in front of Agou.
"You can still live without knowing anything, right?" she continued, "We've lived like this for the past ten years anyway..."
Agou suddenly raised his head, and his empty eye sockets filled with blood-red light stared straight into Shirley's eyes. A deep and hoarse voice came from his skeletal body: "You can survive without knowing anything, but we also need to know that survival is not something that can be taken for granted - this is true for ordinary people, and for the world itself."
Shirley was startled by Agou's sudden serious attitude. She was stunned for a moment, then seemed to understand something vaguely and looked thoughtful.
"The world won't 'survive' like this forever," Agou looked at Shirley's reaction, and laid his head down again, saying in a muffled voice, "The Great Annihilation can destroy those 'old worlds', so the current deep sea era may still be ended by another force. Ordinary people may not know anything about it until the day the end comes. They will welcome the end in a long and peaceful illusion, just like the hometown of the 'warrior', the people in the kingdom waiting for the heroes to triumph, 'ignorance' is their greatest blessing... For them, they can live without knowing anything, because they don't know how far death is.
“But Shirley, we’re not the ones left in the Kingdom—we’re on the Homelander.
"You also saw those omens, the black sun that descended on Plunder, the Creator's blueprint that went out of control in the depths of the frost, the boundless sea when Vision 001 was extinguished, and those mystical cultists... If you are a 'person living in the kingdom', you can't touch them."
Agou kept talking, shaking his head, carefully retracting his fangs, and rubbing Shirley's knee with the tip of his nose.
"Shirley, you can live without knowing anything, but you already know it now. The captain is worried about those ominous omens, and so are you, but you just haven't noticed it."
Shirley calmed down. She sat quietly in the chair for a long time before she reached out and pressed her hand on Agou's skull. There was some uneasiness in her voice: "Agou, are we the ones walking in the wilderness... Just like that 'warrior', are we also trudging towards doomsday?"
"We are heading towards doomsday, and doomsday is heading towards us. 'Cognition' is two-way. When we know of its existence, there is no difference. The only question is... how and when it will catch up with us. I think this is also what the captain is worried about."
"...Agou, why do you understand so well? Understand...this feeling?"
The blood in Agou's eyes slowly changed from bright to dark: "Because I have felt something similar before - when you were very young."
It raised its head and looked into Shirley's eyes.
Its voice was very soft, just like the one it made many years ago when it tried to soothe a frightened little girl to sleep during a thunderstorm.
"In the beginning, you were a creature that I could not understand at all... You were so small and weak, your arms were like thin sticks that could be easily broken. Even though you coexisted with the devil, you were so fragile that you seemed like you could die at any time...
"Every day, every second, I was worried about the coming of this 'death'. I didn't understand your breathing, your heartbeat, or how humans survived. I didn't even know you needed to find food until you had been hungry for several days. As a deep demon, I was not used to 'thinking' at that time, and you... didn't communicate with me much.
"So I always feel that you could die at any time and anywhere due to something I cannot understand. Your breathing, heartbeat, blood flow, these strange 'phenomena' are all extremely fragile 'temporary balances' in my eyes. The termination of any link will make you leave me. So when you woke up as a child, you would always see me groping and observing you, because I wanted to check your breathing and heartbeat to see if you were dead.
"This worry is very similar to the captain's current worry."
Agou paused for a moment, raised his head and looked towards the second floor, but quickly looked away.
"The captain and I are not comparable, and I shouldn't speculate on his thoughts, but today, in his eyes, I felt that familiar... worry. This seemingly vast ocean is probably to him what you were to me many years ago - a small and weak 'weird thing'. I don't know how he survived, but I know he could die at any time."
Agou talked a lot and now he finally quieted down. However, Shirley still stared at him blankly and didn't make a sound for a long time.
"Why don't you speak?" Agou asked puzzledly.
"You never told me this before," Shirley said in a daze, "When I was little..."
"It's all in the past," Agou whispered, "You survived, so all the worries and difficulties in the past are things of the past."
Shirley pursed her lips, and suddenly raised her head with some worry, looking towards the second floor: "Agou, do you think...will we be the warrior and his companions in the story?"
"If possible, I don't want to be like them," Agou shook his head. "The warriors can't stop the end of the world with just a steel sword. Their journey to the end of the world is arduous but doomed to be in vain. But since the captain is leading us, we obviously have more than just a steel sword, so I'd like to be optimistic."
"Captain..." Shirley sighed, "I don't know what the captain is doing now... He hasn't even come down for dinner."
"Will you go up and deliver the food and take a look later?"
"Well, no—Alice will definitely go anyway."
"That's true."
※※※
Looking at the wonderful sky outside the window where the daylight faded and the sky dimmed, but a layer of faint golden "sunshine" always permeated the gaps between the high-rise buildings, Duncan breathed a sigh of relief, turned around and turned on the lights in the room.
Although the "sunshine" that permeated the streets brought eternal "illumination" to Breeze Harbor, after Vision 001 fell, the sunlight that spread from the nearby sea and was blocked by layers of buildings could not illuminate the entire city after all. Deep in the city-state, the night can still be seen where the "sunshine" was blocked by buildings, and here, people still need the comfort of light.
The bright lights dispelled the darkness that was spreading from all around, making the room seem a little warmer.
Outside the window, as the power of Anomaly 001 faded, the pale crack of the World's Creation was gradually emerging in the starless and moonless sky.
The cold and pale light diffused in the night, but was cut into pieces by the "sunlight" that diffused between the high-rise buildings, presenting a strange scene that could not be seen in other city-states, where the creation of the world and the sunlight appeared simultaneously and intertwined with each other.
Duncan looked at the splitting "wound" in the sky, but his mind was still recalling the "memory illusions" he saw today.
He thought of the "deep red" that ran across the sky like a huge scar.
What exactly is that "red light" that stretches across the universe and whose propagation laws seem to be inconsistent with common sense of physics?
Whether it is in the vision of the New Hope crashing, in the oil painting at Alice Mansion, or in the Warrior's hometown on the verge of destruction, there is that red light.
There is no doubt that the red light is the "culprit" that scholars have been searching for, which caused the "Great annihilation" event, or at least the "first symbol" of the Great annihilation.
Looking at the "Creation of the World" that also spanned the sky, Duncan could not help but have a series of unfounded "associations" in his mind:
The destruction of every "old world" is accompanied by the appearance of a huge red light, and in the "deep sea era" of the new world, the pale world scar hangs high in the sky... Is there any connection between the two?
Is the "World Creation" shining in the night sky from the Infinite Ocean the remnant of the end of the old world? Or is it the remnant of the destructive force during the Great Annihilation?
Duncan even had a more disturbing guess -
That destructive force may have never dissipated at all. It has just entered a kind of dormant state, appearing in the sky every night, and the so-called "Creation of the World"... is just the form of the "red light" during its dormancy.
Could it be that the function of Anomaly 001 is to periodically "hypnotize" the "Crimson of Doomsday"?
During this series of speculations, Duncan's eyes gradually became solemn, and another question that he had never thought about before suddenly emerged in his mind.
In his hometown, at least in the hometown in his memory... he had never seen that "red light".