Chapter 165 Lucretia's Pressure

With a series of strange noises, the clockwork doll froze completely like a rusted machine. Almost at the same time, Lucretia, who was in a nearby cabin, noticed the abnormality of her creation.

The door of the cabin was suddenly pushed open, and a stack of dancing colorful paper pieces swirled into the room like a whirlwind, condensing into a human form as they spun. The "Sea Witch" Lucretia stepped out from the colored paper and saw Lunny, who had slipped and was leaning against the table, her head drooping.

"Lunny?" Lucretia quickly walked forward and immediately noticed the clockwork key that had fallen on the floor beside her. She picked up the key and patted the clockwork doll's back. "What happened?"

A series of intermittent creaking sounds came from Lunny's body. After a while, some of her parts finally resumed functioning, and a severely out-of-tune voice sounded from her chest: "Old Master… is looking for you…"

With a "clang," the clockwork key in Lucretia's hand fell to the ground.

Lunny turned her head, instinctively reaching for her clockwork key, wanting to reinsert it into her back, but her movement stopped halfway, and the sound of gears spinning idly followed.

Lucretia's face changed drastically. When she heard the words "Old Master," her pupils trembled, but the sound of Lunny's malfunctioning quickly awakened her. She shook her head abruptly, forcibly suppressing her chaotic thoughts as she held the clockwork doll's shoulders: "Lunny, standby."

The clockwork doll slowly closed her eyes: "Command received. Lunny is entering standby mode."

A moment later, deep within the Brilliant Star, in a brightly lit cabin, Lucretia was busy at her workbench.

This was a laboratory that could be described as "complete and advanced" even by the standards of the Academy of Truth headquarters. The spacious room was equipped with sophisticated and complex mechanical devices and pressure pipes for powering various equipment. Among the countless machines were auxiliary devices covered with magical runes, as well as many glowing crystal containers or reaction chambers. A dozen automaton dolls were tending to these automatically running devices, allowing Lucretia to focus all her attention on the work in front of her.

Before the "Sea Witch," Lunny lay quietly on the large workbench.

The clockwork doll had been disassembled. The outer shell, fashioned into a maid's uniform, was now placed aside. The adamantine skeleton and various brass mechanical components almost covered the platform. Only the part above Lunny's chest remained intact. This part was placed on the edge of the platform, and she stared blankly at her disassembled body, occasionally blinking.

"Easy… to… repair…?" a somewhat out-of-tune voice came from Lunny's chest.

"Don't worry, it's just that the transmission mechanism suddenly jammed, causing the bearings to deform," Lucretia said, busy without looking up. "The workload is large, but the repair process itself is not complicated—your heart is undamaged."

Lunny slowly rotated her eyeballs. She saw the "heart" placed in the center of the workbench.

It was a delicate brass sphere, pieced together from countless complex and precise metal plates. It floated quietly above a pile of parts, its surface plates shifting position from time to time, revealing the structure inside. When the angle of the metal plates was right, the shining runes engraved inside the sphere could be clearly seen. A more slender object floated in the center of those runes.

It was a finger—a very slender, very fragile finger, smaller than the finger of a human child, meticulously crafted by a puppeteer a hundred years ago.

That was the true core, the true essence of the automaton doll "Lunny"—the last proof left in this world by a doll born a hundred years ago.

Lucretia noticed Lunny's gaze. She looked up, and the movements of her hands suddenly paused.

After a moment, she continued to busy herself, saying casually, "I transformed you into this appearance. Have you ever resented me?"

"Why… would Lunny resent?" The doll's head on the workbench emitted a stiff voice. "Mistress… gave Lunny life. Lunny… is happy for it…"

"But all of this was initially just a whim of my own—and for this whim, I destroyed your original body," Lucretia said indifferently. "For a long time at the beginning, I didn't realize that you had developed true thinking ability due to the influence of the borderlands. At that time, I only thought you were a machine, and I carried out many reckless 'experimental modifications' on you."

Lunny did not respond to her mistress, but after a moment of silence, she suddenly said, "Your emotions are tense. You have something on your mind—the mistress under normal circumstances would not suddenly say these inexplicable things."

Lucretia was silent for two or three seconds: "…Do you remember what you said just now? After I just arrived in the dining room and woke you up."

"…Memory retrieval failed. Lunny does not remember."

"You told me, 'Old Master' is looking for me."

A series of strange noises came from the clockwork doll's chest, but not due to malfunction, but due to confused thoughts.

"Do you really not remember?" Lucretia raised her head, quietly watching Lunny's eyes.

"Memory retrieval failed. Lunny does not remember."

"…Then it seems that my terrible father doesn't want me to have any chance to peek back at his situation," Lucretia said with a complex smile on her face. She slowly removed a set of deformed gears, her tone somewhat erratic. "He just sent a one-way signal to tell me… he knows where the Brilliant Star is, he knows how to find me…"

"You are afraid."

"Scared to death—but more than fear, it's a kind of… sadness."

"Sadness? Why?"

Lucretia looked at Lunny's eyes, and after a long time, she shook her head gently: "These are emotions that are too complex for you. You probably can't understand them yet."

"Okay, Lunny will try to understand in the future," the clockwork doll replied, and then asked, "Do you think the Old Master is giving you some kind of warning?"

"…I don't know, but it does seem like a warning," Lucretia said softly. "Even like some kind of declaration before a hunt… He has returned from the sub-space, and he is more elusive than the last time he returned. Perhaps I should remind my brother…"

"You should indeed remind Mr. Tyrian. He has already set off for Pland, and the magistrate of Pland said that the Lost Ship is approaching that city-state."

Lucretia nodded lightly, saying nothing more, and continued to busy herself.

…

Duncan carefully placed "Nirou" in the antique wooden box, and put the feather-shaped hairpin back in the drawer.

Then he frowned at the wooden box containing "Nirou."

As a grown man, he always felt that there was something wrong with keeping a girly doll in his bedroom.

But besides putting it in his bedroom, he couldn't think of a better place.

Although the first test did not yield any results, and no clues pointing to the extraordinary were found in the doll "Nirou," this was, after all, something related to "Lucretia." Since he was not sure if she would be of any use in the future, he did not dare to put the doll anywhere out of his sight.

After hesitating for a while, Duncan sighed and temporarily placed "Lunny's" box on his bedside table.

"If you really have anything special about you, then 'show your hand' as soon as possible," he looked at the ornate classical wooden box and shook his head gently. "Don't be like Alice, having to be thrown into the sea to perform some coffin-charging surfing show."

The wooden box, of course, had no reaction, but Duncan didn't care.

He came to the window and looked at the sky outside.

Night had fallen, and the pale, dim light of the Worldscar was shining on the boundless sea.

The powerful exorcising power brought by the sun had faded in the real world, and those twisted, ominous, and corrosive forces were gradually rising throughout the world. At this time, humans would enter dreams to avoid the world's interference with reason.

But for Duncan… he never felt any discomfort in the night, nor had he seen those shadows that ordinary people feared.

Night was the time when his mind was at its sharpest.

He returned to his desk, quietly unfolded a piece of white paper, and took a pen from the side.

These were all things he had just bought from the Pland city-state.

After a moment of contemplation, he wrote lines of text on the paper:

1889, the Sun Fragment appeared, causing the Pland Fire;

Hidden beneath the factory curtain in the Sixth District is a "reality" destroyed by the fire;

A twisted space-time, suspected of being a closed loop, exists within the Sixth District Community Church. Two completely opposite realities are superimposed in the church;

The origin of A Gou's "humanity" is unknown, but it is clearly not the power of the Sun Fragment;

The goddess statue in the Sixth District Church is suspected of being affected by a sub-space rift. The nuns in the underground sanctuary are suspected of dying in the process of resisting the sub-space invasion…