Chương 158: 12. Echoes 3

I stood at the base of the ramp, staring at the vast dark shape resting beside the underground water, and for a moment forgot entirely whether I was supposed to inhale or close my mouth first. If the Kingdom's warships were armored beasts of iron and timber, then this thing belonged to an entirely different category of existence. It was too quiet. Too quiet to be a ship. More like a black sarcophagus someone had deliberately interred within the mountain.

Its lines had no ornament—no figurehead, no masts, none of the familiar rise and fall of a working deck. It was simply long. Long past any reasonable justification, as though someone had cast night itself into metal and forced it into this underground berth. That purity of form—so functional it bordered on cruel—was more unsettling than any blade. I genuinely wondered, if it hadn't been sitting beside the water, whether I would have identified it as a vessel at all.

"This thing..." My throat was dry.

"It was actually meant for sailing?"

"If not, the ancients wouldn't have excavated an entire dock for it." Ignicia's voice was equally subdued. She stood beside me, golden slit-pupils fixed and unblinking on the shape ahead—the gaze of someone watching something that had no business waking in this era. Her hand remained at her side, her breathing slightly heavier than usual, but her expression was, if anything, calmer than it had been in the briefing room. Or rather—she had simply buried the unease deeper. I moved forward a few more steps.

The metal platform underfoot had long since lost any original sheen, its surface layered with dust and salt-crust, each step producing a low, hollow resonance. From the railing's edge, the upper section of the vessel became clearer. Its hull wasn't featureless—it was covered in seams and protrusions, but nothing resembling the rivets and planking familiar to any shipwright in the Kingdom. The joins looked more like components of a precisely assembled whole.

Midway along the top, the low ridge-spine rose again—the only part of the black creature that broke its surface. And the strangest thing: it had no windows. At least none I could see from here. I stared at that expanse of black hull for a long moment, the unease in my stomach steadily deepening.

"A ship with no windows," I said quietly.

"Where exactly were the ancients planning to take it? The underworld?"

"More likely the ocean floor," Ignicia replied evenly. I turned to look at her. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the ship, her tone carrying the quality of someone acknowledging something she would have preferred not to.

"Its shape isn't designed to ride waves. It's designed to cut through water itself. No external structures, hull that streamlined—something like this would make more sense submerged than floating on the surface." I went quiet. That observation was more disturbing than the ship itself. When a Kingdom vessel goes under the sea, it's called a shipwreck. If what stood before us had been built specifically to go under the sea—then it had never been a ship in any sense I understood, not from the beginning.

I looked back at the black hull, and found I could no longer think of it as a coffin. It felt more like a creature that had chosen, willingly, to sink into the deep. A muffled metallic impact sounded from somewhere behind us. Not loud. But sufficient to drag me back from wherever my thoughts had gone. The sea-dragon people were still searching. Whether they'd found another route through the outer facility, whether they were already in the passages we'd walked—it didn't matter.

This underground base, however large, was not a place where we could afford to stand and stare indefinitely. I forced a breath out and tore my gaze from the black shape, turning my attention to the surrounding space. The dock hadn't been built purely for display. Along one side of the dark water ran a straight maintenance platform. On the other side, multiple levels of metal walkways and crane arms were suspended at varying heights.

Most of the cranes had rusted solid, their hanging cables stiffened into something resembling rigor mortis. But along one side of the hull, I spotted a narrow bridge angled across the gap. If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. More precisely: a boarding bridge. It extended from the dock platform to the mid-section of the black vessel—narrow, its railings deteriorated, its surface thick with accumulated grime, but intact.

At its far end, it connected to an opening in the hull that was roughly circular. The opening's rim was heavy, its perimeter fitted with a visible locking mechanism—it looked like a door, but less like any ship's door than anything I had ever seen.

"That's an entry point," I said.

"I can see that."

"I only mentioned it in case Your Highness was so absorbed in the ancient monstrosity that the bridge had escaped her notice." She finally turned to look at me. The look was very mild. Mild in the way of someone who had nearly run out of energy to bother being contemptuous.

"If you're so determined to stay here and continue mourning the ancients and their fallen nation," she said, pausing to let her tone drop several degrees colder, "I can accommodate you. Provided the sea-dragon people find your corpse first, not mine."

"... I formally withdraw my previous statement." I moved forward a few more steps and crouched at the platform's edge, running my fingers along the surface. The dust was thick. Genuinely undisturbed—years, possibly decades, of no meaningful foot traffic. But in several spots the accumulation was noticeably thinner, as though someone had braced a hand there recently, or shifted equipment across the surface.

The traces were faint enough that if my nerves weren't currently strung tight as a fully drawn bowstring, I would have missed them entirely. My stomach sank.

"Your Highness."

"What?"

"This place... we might not be the only ones who've been here." Her brow shifted almost imperceptibly. She followed my gaze to the disturbed patches, then looked up toward the boarding bridge and the circular hatch set into the vessel's hull.

"Sea-dragon people?" I asked quietly.

"Not necessarily," she said flatly.

"Could be Blazing Summer personnel. Could be both."

"Then why is this thing still here?"

"Because they couldn't get inside. Or..." She stared at the black submersible, her gaze darkening.

"... they got inside and couldn't handle what they found." That sentence crawled up my spine and made itself comfortable. But thinking it through, she was probably right. If the Blazing Yanxia Empire or the sea-dragon clans had fully mastered this place, they wouldn't have settled for using the outer facility as a supply cache, and they certainly wouldn't have left the island looking like a forgotten watering stop. They would have gutted it—stripped it bare, dismantled everything worth taking.

They wouldn't have left an ancient monstrosity like this resting quietly in the heart of the dock, as though still waiting for its crew to return. Which meant— To them, this place was nothing more than a door handle. The heart remained untouched. Realizing that actually made it easier to breathe. Not relief, exactly. More like a grim sort of equilibrium: at least we weren't the only ones stumbling around in the dark. Ignicia had already started toward the boarding bridge.

I followed instinctively, then stopped just short of setting foot on it.

"Wait." She looked back, one eyebrow lifting slightly—the expression of someone wondering whether I'd finally chosen this moment to discover fear.

"If this thing really was built to go underwater," I said, trying to make my voice sound like tactical analysis rather than stalling, "then whatever's inside probably wasn't designed for comfortable exploration. Add ancient weapons, ancient explosives, ancient corpses... This humble servant feels we should possess at least one defensible reason before boarding." She looked at me. I looked at her. Honestly, even to my own ears it sounded like a man trying to talk himself out of something he'd already decided to do.

But from Black Dragon Pass all the way to this godforsaken hole, we'd seen enough consequences of touching things simply because they were there. Whatever lay beyond that hatch was manifestly more dangerous than rations, briefing rooms, and dead men's weapons combined. If pure curiosity was the only justification, I'd rather bury myself back on the beach. Ignicia was quiet for a moment. Then she said, voice low: "There are three reasons." She raised one finger.

"First: the people outside are searching inward. However large this base is, they'll work through it layer by layer. The only place that can truly hide us—and that's likely to offer a second exit—isn't in the outer facility or the living quarters. It's inside that ship." A second finger.

"Second: if the Old Civilization truly stored world-ending weapons in facilities like this, then that vessel almost certainly contains more than anything we've found out here. Text, diagrams, records—orders, even. You've seen how those people died. The real answers are most likely inside." A third finger.

"Third," she said, looking straight at me now, her gaze colder and more direct than before, "if the Blazing Yanxia Empire and the sea-dragon clans are both hunting for whatever this place is actually worth, then we need to know what that is before they do." I had nothing clever to say to that. Because she was right. Annoyingly, impeccably right. I looked down at the narrow boarding bridge, then across to the silent circular hatch at the other end.

Part of me wanted desperately to argue that it wasn't too late to turn back—find another passage, another room, another way to die entirely. But a clearer voice had already settled the question: No. We've come this far. This isn't something we can choose to look at or not. It's become something we can't afford to ignore. Besides—the soldiers on that wall of light had spent their final moments speaking to this exact facility. I looked up at Ignicia.

"All right," I said.

"Let's board." She didn't look triumphant. She simply nodded, as though this had always been the only path we were going to take. Then she pressed her hand back against her side, steadied her breathing, and turned toward the narrow bridge leading into the belly of the ancient machine. I fell into step behind her, resigned in the way that had become my default setting since this whole mess began, and looked toward that circular hatch. We both understood what crossing that bridge meant. Not simply boarding a ship.

Entering an iron sarcophagus that belonged to a nation that no longer existed.