Witch, Fireball and the Evil God of Steam-Chapter 729 - 102: They’re All Dead

That ship,

Oh, it's that starship...

Carrying a carefully selected crew and an army loyal to the People's Assembly.

Duli knew he shouldn't answer any questions from Merlin. He sensed that these two people inviting him had no good intentions. However, perhaps it was because of the alcohol, those past memories kept flooding back.

An accident occurred during the voyage.

That coordinate was a trap.

The black hole blocked their navigation route, its magnitude beyond human comprehension. Perhaps the star system itself was the black hole.

The starship was swept in by gravity.

Next came days of darkness, any light within the starship was consumed by the omnipresent darkness.

The crew couldn't determine their location, and before the captain "turned off the lights," he gathered some of the crew and they hid in the control room.

Outside the control room, it was eerily quiet. This starship was filled with trained soldiers equipped with the finest weapons, but only on the first day did they hear a few gunshots.

The team searching for supplies lost two members, the cabin was filled with the smell of blood. Perhaps being unable to see anything was a good thing for them.

On the fourth day, the two missing members returned to the control room, but the rest of the first search team went mad, they recklessly attacked the two who returned, and the other crew members rushed in to subdue them. The captain isolated those who went mad.

Among those isolated was his grandfather.

Everyone believed they had gone insane. The control room's psychologist thought that under such circumstances, developing a mental illness wasn't surprising. The urgent task was to find a way to control the starship and escape the black hole's range. The crew in the control room were actively seeking ways to escape to safety.

But,

they were doomed.

He felt that the omnipresent darkness was actually some kind of life form beyond their understanding, and on the first day they fell into the darkness, something boarded their ship.

The reason his grandfather was so certain and joined the patrol team in recklessly attacking the two who returned was because of a secret they hadn't told anyone, and at the end of his life, his grandfather made one last call to the family, revealing the secret he had kept in his heart.

It was the seventh day in the black hole when he made the call, and his tone seemed more like a confession.

Grandfather said everyone in the control room was dead, and he was the last survivor.

However, they heard the voices of others on the phone, the atmosphere was somewhat lively, the crew seemed to be discussing what to have for dinner, everything sounded normal over there.

The crew called his grandfather's name, inviting him to join them for dinner, have a drink before sleeping, and discuss travel plans after reaching the empire because they were about to arrive.

The starship successfully crossed the black hole, and that beautiful planet was within reach.

In such a light and pleasant atmosphere, grandfather revealed his secret.

Those two crew members were already dead.

Because on the day of the supply search, they had a disagreement with the other team members, and the argument escalated. Then a nameless rage flared within them, and under the influence of anger, everyone lost control. Grandfather only remembered that he, along with others, pinned those two to the ground, and repeatedly stabbed them with knives until they stopped moving.

At the same time, everyone lost rationality.

They couldn't tell the captain about this, so they hid the bodies in a storage room, fabricating a lie about their disappearance.

Now, those two called his grandfather's name from the other side of the phone.

They seemed unbothered or had completely forgotten that part of the memory.

And at the end of the call, there wasn't a warm goodbye.

Duli remembered his grandfather's voice suddenly became strange, the footsteps drew closer to grandfather, and he heard the sound of interference in the waves.

"It knows everything."

This was the last sentence grandfather left them, it happened when Duli was very young, so young that he had no concept of the strange call. He only vaguely remembered his mother, frozen in shock while answering the call, unable to say a word even after it ended.

He remembered the committee launched a long-term investigation, strangers frequently appeared at their house, rummaging through all items related to grandfather, then packing them in boxes and taking them away.

His grandfather never called back.

No call records, no details to support the fact that they had received a call, the committee determined his mother's mental state was disturbed, sending her to a psychiatric hospital for a month. After that, his mother accepted the committee's judgment and never mentioned the incident again.

It was indeed a logical judgment.

Human signals cannot traverse black holes, how could grandfather call them during his final moments?

Unless...

Grandfather made a deal with the unknown presence in the darkness.

No one could figure out the deep meaning of grandfather's last message in the call.

The reason Duli could still remember was because, on the seventh day after his mother's funeral, he received an anonymous letter containing a chip.

The chip recreated the scene of that time, it was a quiet afternoon for them. He was sitting on the couch watching "Tom and Jerry," then his mother's phone rang on the TV cabinet.

"I should really go back!"

Duli jolted to alertness, propped himself up from the bar table. His mind felt like mush, memories flashing through his mind, under the influence of alcohol, he didn't know if he violated the confidentiality agreement, but he really had to go home now.

He saw Zhuang Xiao and Merlin thinking deeply, this time, they didn't stop him.

Back home, Duli took off his shoes and socks and collapsed into bed.

Since his parents passed away, he had been living alone, wanting to forget everything, but the memories from the past were like monsters hidden under the bed in ghost stories, revealing their fangs in the quiet night.

He made a decision.

Tomorrow, he would express to Chen Qi his determination to quit the experiment.

However, he didn't sleep well.

Maybe it was because he drank too much, he sweated a lot, waking up several times during the night, feeling disoriented, and each time he woke, some changes seemed to occur in his room.

He always felt someone had broken into his apartment.

This time, as the bed shook, he finally couldn't stand it anymore.

There was a .45 caliber pistol in the drawer of the nightstand, a gift from his grandfather, placing it in the drawer gave him some sense of security.

This might be the unluckiest day of his life.

The lamp was broken, he fumbled for the gun in the drawer in a daze, turned off safety, tremblingly holding it in his hand, but in reality, he had no experience firing a gun, nor had he hurt anyone.

After doing all that, Duli took a deep breath and got out of bed.

The phone screen showed it was almost dawn, it was the last darkness before dawn.

He slowly bent down, clumsily crawling on the floor, he had done this countless times—checking the gaps under the bed frame, or pulling open the slightly ajar wardrobe doors, only to find they had been false alarms.

There are no ghosts in this world, that's something people made up to scare themselves.

But suddenly, Duli felt his heart stop.

He saw a pair of eyes in the dark gap under the bed, those eyes were bloodshot, staring back at him, shrouded in darkness, the features and body were unclear, but the one thing Duli could confirm was that they defied gravity, lying on his bed frame.

"Bang—!"

4:21 AM.

A gunshot echoed for a long time in the hallway of an apartment in the South District.