Deep Sea Embers

Chapter 166 Lucrezia's Pressure
Accompanied by a series of weird noises, the clockwork man stopped completely like a rusty machine, and almost at the same time, Lucrecia, who was in the nearby cabin, noticed the abnormality of her creation.

The door of the cabin was suddenly pushed open, and a stack of flying colored papers was swept into the room like a whirlwind, and condensed into a human figure in the circling. I saw Luni who had slipped and leaned against the table with her head down.

"Luni?" Lucrezia walked forward quickly, and immediately found the wind-up key that fell on the floor next to her. She picked up the key, and went forward to pat the wind-up doll's back. Organ box, "What happened?"

A series of intermittent creaking sounds came from Luni's body, and after a while, some of her parts finally resumed operation, and a seriously out-of-tune voice sounded from her chest: "The old master... is looking for you... "

With a clang, the wind-up key in Lucrezia's hand fell to the ground.

Luni turned her head following the sound, and instinctively reached out to fumble for her wind-up key, trying to reinsert it on her back, but she only got stuck in the middle of the movement, and then there was a sound of gears idling .

Lucrezia's complexion changed drastically. When she heard the word "Old Master", her pupils trembled, but the malfunction sound in Luni's body woke her up quickly. She shook her head suddenly, While forcibly suppressing the chaotic thoughts, he hugged the wind-up doll's shoulder: "Luni, stand by."

The wind-up doll slowly closed its eyes: "The order has been received, and Luni is on standby."

A moment later, in the depths of the Bright Star cabin, in a brightly lit cabin, Lucrezia was busy at the workbench.

This is a laboratory that can be evaluated as "complete and advanced" even if it is located in the headquarters of the Institute of Truth. The spacious room is equipped with sophisticated mechanical devices and pressure pipes for powering various equipment. Among the countless machines, auxiliary equipment covered with magic runes can be seen, as well as many crystal containers or reactors that are emitting shimmering light. More than a dozen automatic mechanism dolls are taking care of these automatically operating equipment, Let Lucrezia focus on the work in front of her.

In front of this "Sea Witch", Luni was lying quietly on the large workbench.

The clockwork puppet has been disassembled, and the shell imitating the maid's costume is now being put aside. The skeleton made of fine gold and various mechanism components made of brass almost cover the platform. Now Luni only has a chest The above part remained intact, and this part was placed on the edge of the platform. She stared blankly at her disassembled body, blinking her eyes occasionally.

"Okay... repair...?" A slightly out-of-tune voice came from Luni's chest.

"Don't worry, it's just that the transmission mechanisms are suddenly stuck and the bearings are deformed," Lucrezia is busy without looking up, "The project is a lot, but the repair process itself is not complicated—your 'heart' is not affected." damage."

Luni slowly rolled her eyes, and she saw the "heart" placed in the center of the workbench.

It was an exquisite brass ball, spliced ​​by countless complex and precise metal pieces. It floated quietly above a pile of parts. The metal pieces on its surface changed positions from time to time, revealing the structure inside. When the ball was opened, it could be clearly seen that the inside of the ball was engraved with shiny runes, and a more slender thing was floating in the center of those runes.

It was a finger—a very slender, very fragile finger, smaller than the finger of a human child, carefully crafted by a puppeteer 100 years ago.

That is the true core, the true essence of the mechanical doll "Luni"—the last proof that a doll born 100 years ago remains in this world.

Lucrezia noticed Luni's gaze, she looked up, and the movements of her hands suddenly stopped.

After a while, she continued to get busy, and at the same time said as if inadvertently: "I transformed you into this way, have you ever complained?"

"Luni...why do you want to be resentful?" The doll's head on the workbench made a dull voice, "The hostess... gave Luni life, and Luni is... happy..."

"But all of this was just a whim of mine at the beginning—and for this whim, I destroyed your original body," Lucrezia said lightly, "for a long time at the beginning I didn't even realize that you had real thinking ability due to the influence of the frontier, at that time I only thought of you as a machine, and made many 'experimental modifications' to you regardless of the consequences."

Lu Ni did not respond to her hostess, but suddenly said after a moment of silence: "Your mood is tense, you have something on your mind——under normal circumstances, a hostess would not suddenly say such inexplicable words."

Lucrecia was silent for two or three seconds: "...Do you remember what you said just now? After I just rushed to the restaurant and woke you up."

"...Memory retrieval failed, Luni can't remember."

"You tell me that the 'Old Master' is looking for me."

There was an eerie noise coming from the wind-up doll's chest, not from a malfunction, but from confused thinking.

"You really don't remember?" Lucrezia raised her head and looked into Luni's eyes quietly.

"Memory retrieval failed, Luni can't remember."

"...It seems that my terrible father doesn't want me to have any chance to spy on him in reverse," Lucrezia showed a complicated smile on her face, and she slowly dismantled a set of deformations. "He just sent a unilateral signal, telling me...he knows where the Bright Star is, and he knows how to find me..."

"You are afraid."

"Scared to death—but more of a...sadness than fear."

"Sad? Why?"

Lucrezia looked into Luni's eyes, and shook her head slightly after a long time: "This is too complicated emotion for you, I'm afraid you still can't understand it now."

"Okay, Luni will try to understand in the future," the clockwork doll replied, and then asked again, "Do you think the old master is giving you some kind of warning?"

"...I don't know, but it's really like a warning," Lucrezia said softly, "it's even like some kind of pre-hunt announcement... He's back from the warp, and he's more powerful than he was when he returned last time." Even more unpredictable, maybe I should remind my brother..."

"You should indeed remind Mr. Tirian that he has set out for Purland, and the consul of Purland said that the Lost Country is approaching that city-state."

Lucrezia nodded lightly, didn't say anything more, just continued to keep her head down and busy.

……

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

Then he looked at the wooden box where "Nilu" was stored and became worried.

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

But he couldn't think of any better place than to put it in his bedroom.

Although the first test failed to achieve any results, and did not find any clues pointing to the supernatural from the "Nilu" doll, this is something related to "Lucrecia" after all. Determined whether she could be of any use in the future, he dared not place the doll casually out of his sight.

After struggling for a while, Duncan still sighed, and temporarily put the box of "Nilu" beside his bed.

"If you really have something special, show your hands as soon as possible." He looked at the gorgeous classical wooden box and shook his head lightly, "Don't be like Alice, who has to be thrown into the sea to perform a coffin charge. .”

The crate didn't respond, of course, but Duncan didn't care either.

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

Night had fallen, and the pale, dim gleam of the Creation of the World shone on the great sea.

The powerful exorcism power brought by the sun has subsided in the real world, and those distorted, ominous, and corrosive forces are gradually rising in the whole world. At this time, human beings will enter dreams to avoid the world's interference with reason.

But as far as Duncan is concerned... he has never felt any discomfort in the night, and he has never seen those shadows that make ordinary people fear.

Night is when his mind is sharpest.

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

These are all things just bought from the Puland city-state.

After pondering for a while, he wrote lines of text on the paper:

In 1889, fragments of the sun appeared and sparked the Prand fire;

Under the curtain of the Sixth Street factory hides a "reality" that has been destroyed by fire;
There is a distorted space-time that is suspected to be a closed loop in the community church in the sixth block, and two diametrically opposite realities are superimposed in the church;

The source of Agou's "humanity" is unknown, but it is obviously not affected by the power of sun fragments;

The statue of the goddess in the church in the sixth block is suspected to be affected by the subspace rift, and the nun in the underground church is suspected to have died in the process of fighting against the invasion of the subspace...

(End of this chapter)