Chapter 1

The rigid, black face of the wooden goat's head stared at Duncan, who was sitting behind the nautical chart table. An eerie light seemed to flow in its obsidian eyes—though the thing was incapable of making expressions. Still, Duncan clearly sensed a kind of expectation from that wooden face.

In fact, it wasn't the first time the goat's head had urged him to "set sail." Every time he came here, the goat's head would urge him.

He even felt that the ship was constantly urging him to end this aimless drifting and get back on the right track as soon as possible.

But Duncan fell silent. His face, with its innate dignity, was now covered with dark clouds. In contemplation and silence, he clearly realized two problems:

First, he was the only person on this entire ship, and the scale of this ship was simply insane—as a sailing ship, this vessel called the "Vanishing Line" was at least one hundred and fifty to two hundred meters long, according to Duncan's rough estimate. To operate such a behemoth, at least dozens or even hundreds of experienced sailors would be needed. How could he sail it alone?

Second, aside from the aforementioned professional factors, there was another key issue hindering his voyage—he didn't know how to sail a ship.

Duncan was a little anxious. He tried to imagine what would happen if he asked the strange and noisy goat's head in front of him for ship-handling techniques. After imagining it, he became even more anxious.

However, the goat's head didn't know what its captain was thinking. It just asked, "Captain, do you have any concerns? If you're worried about the condition of the Vanishing Line, you can rest assured that the Vanishing Line is always ready to sail with you to the ends of the world. Or are you worried that today's departure is inauspicious? I have some knowledge of divination. I don't know which kind of divination you trust more. Celestial phenomena, incense, crystals are all fine. Speaking of crystals, do you remember…"

Duncan tried hard to keep his facial muscles taut, while restraining the urge to fight the goat's head to the death, and said in a deep voice, "I'll go to the deck to observe the situation first—you stay here quietly."

"As you wish—but I must remind you that the Vanishing Line has been drifting aimlessly for too long. You must take charge of it as soon as possible and bring this voyage back on track…"

The goat's head said, and then, accompanied by the sound of wood rubbing, it finally returned to its original posture.

Duncan instantly felt that the whole world had quieted down.

He breathed a sigh of relief, the resonance in his brain gradually subsided, and then he picked up the flintlock pistol on the table and got up to leave the captain's cabin.

This seemingly old flintlock pistol was found by him while exploring the ship. He also found a one-handed sword, which was currently hanging on his waist. These two things were his guarantee of safety when moving around the ship.

In the past few days of exploration, he had spent a long time roughly learning how to use these two things—although so far, he had never seen any living creatures other than himself on this ship.

"Objects" that can talk don't count.

The salty sea breeze rushed towards him, and Duncan's slightly irritated mood calmed down. He came to the deck outside the captain's cabin and subconsciously looked up at the sky.

Dense dark clouds still covered the sky as far as the eye could see. No sun, moon, or stars could be seen in the clouds, only a turbid sky light shrouded this boundless sea.

This scene had been going on for a long time. In fact, since Duncan came to this ship, he had only seen such a sky—which even made him wonder if there was any normal weather in this world at all, and whether this cloudy scene was the eternal celestial phenomenon on this sea?

Duncan turned around. He saw the door of the captain's cabin standing there quietly. Above the door, on the horizontal beam, a line of words was engraved in some kind of alphabet he didn't recognize, and when his eyes focused on the line of words, its meaning was directly and clearly reflected in his mind:

"The Door of the Lost."

"The Door of the Lost… Vanishing Line, huh," Duncan muttered to himself, then added with some self-deprecation, "This ship has a good name."

Then he stepped around the captain's cabin and came to the upper deck at the stern of the ship along the stairs on the edge of the deck. Here, there was a wooden platform, the most open place on the entire ship besides the watchtower.

A heavy black helm quietly awaited the arrival of the helmsman on the platform.

Duncan frowned. For some reason, he suddenly felt a sense of urgency and anxiety, and this feeling seemed to arise out of nowhere the moment he saw the helm.

He hadn't felt this way the few times he had been here before!

As if in response to the anxiety in his heart, a sudden, chaotic wind blew across the deck, and the originally calm sea surface instantly rippled. Although this wind and wave were not enough to have any impact on the massive "Vanishing Line," Duncan's heart was alarmed. In the next second, he looked towards the bow of the ship under the urge of instinct.

On the sea directly in front of the Vanishing Line, between that chaotic and hazy sky and sea, an boundless, seemingly heaven-reaching wall of white mist suddenly appeared, causing his eyes to widen instantly!

That was a white mist that seemed to surround and isolate the entire world, connecting the sky and the earth like a ten-thousand-foot cliff, and crushing over. What made Duncan (Zhou Ming) more vigilant than its frightening scale was that the thing instantly reminded him of the boundless fog outside the window of his single apartment!

The Vanishing Line was sailing straight towards that wall of fog!

Duncan didn't know what that fog was, and he didn't know what was in the depths of the fog, but he instinctively felt a great danger. The instinct for survival told him that being swallowed by that fog was definitely not a good thing!

He subconsciously rushed to the platform where the helm was located—a huge sense of powerlessness also enveloped him at the same time: even if he steered, how could he drive this huge ship away from that wall of fog with only his strength?

But he still instinctively came to the helm, and almost at the same time, he heard a hoarse and gloomy voice coming from a copper pipe next to the helm that connected to the captain's cabin. It was the voice of the "goat's head"—the tone of the strange thing was a little panicked this time:

"Captain, the border is collapsing ahead, we are approaching the limit of reality! Please adjust course immediately!"

Listening to the goat's head's panicked voice, Duncan almost burst into swearing—it was easy to say adjust course, but why don't you conjure up hundreds of good brothers who know how to sail to get this thing going!

Then he looked up at the direction of the masts in front of him, and saw only a few bare masts standing on the deck. His heart was filled with sorrow—not to mention raising the sails, the fact was that this ship had no sails at all. Those poles were all empty!

Under the agitation of emotions, he didn't even bother to seriously think about the strange words that the goat's head had just uttered. Only instinct made him subconsciously grab the helm in front of him, which seemed to be trembling slightly for some reason.

For several days, this was the first time he had taken the initiative to put his hand on the helm of the Vanishing Line—the strange situation on this ship and the goat's head's repeated urging had always made him suspicious and full of resistance to the matter of "steering," but now, he finally had no chance to hesitate.

He held the helm tightly, his blank mind not even having time to conceive how to steer an empty ghost ship with one person's strength.

The change happened in the next instant.

A sound like a mountain roaring and a tsunami exploded in Duncan's mind, as if ten thousand cheering people were standing on the shore to see a ship off, as if hundreds of shouting sailors were shouting the captain's name on the deck, and in the middle, there seemed to be a mixture of desolate sea shanties and invisible stormy waves.

A ball of green flame appeared at the edge of his vision. Duncan subconsciously looked at his palm. He saw a ball of emerald fire suddenly burst out from the helm of the Vanishing Line, and swept over with amazing swiftness, spreading all over his body in the blink of an eye.

In the raging flames, the flesh and blood body suddenly became hollow and illusory. The captain's uniform became tattered and worn, as if it had been soaked in seawater for decades or hundreds of years. Under the flesh and blood that suddenly became illusory like a spirit, Duncan could even vaguely see his bones—the crystal-clear jade-like bones were jumping with flames, and the unquenchable fire flowed through his body like water.

However, he didn't feel any pain or heat. In the raging flames, he only felt that his perception was spreading in all directions.

The fire swept down from the bridge, over the deck, over the ship's rails, over the masts. The flames were intertwined like a net, and rose from the deck like breathing, spreading all the way along the lonely masts, and finally weaving into huge sails like gauze and mist between the sea and the fog.

The Vanishing Line had set sail, in front of this rapidly collapsing border of reality.

(Mom, surprise!

ps: Dawn's light over there has a new chapter, theoretically it should be the last chapter, you can go and have a look ~~~)