Elliot tried to struggle.
Elias didn't give him the chance.
The old man had barely raised his cane-pinned wrist half an inch when a cold surge of spirituality flowed from Elias's fingertips onto him.
【Sleep Spell】.
Elliot's eyes quickly went vacant, and with the cloth sash still stuffed in his mouth, he slumped limply beside the Dream Helm.
How could his remaining spirituality compete with Elias's over-limit 【Sleep Spell】?
Elias casually pulled the ball of cloth out.
Capturing him was one thing, but it would be a real disaster if a simple sleep spell ended up killing him.
“Wouldn't it have been better to cooperate from the start?” Elias retracted his cane. “At your age, you should sleep more instead of constantly scheming on how to plague the youth.”
Elliot, of course, could not argue back.
After all, he was already sleeping very peacefully.
As the leader of the ritual fell silent, the projections of the deceased on the deck also came to a halt.
The woman serving fish soup, the child cradling the wooden boat, and the figures silently singing nursery rhymes across the black sea all froze in their final postures.
Only the one hundred and thirty-six black-silver threads continued to vibrate gently.
“I'll go find Robert,” Elias said, kicking Elliot away from the Dream Helm. After confirming that the old man wouldn't wake up anytime soon, he headed toward the companionway.
“Alright,” Theolan said, his hands still occupied by those threads. “We'll continue to communicate through the 【Mental Channel】.”
Elias stepped down the narrow wooden ladder into the lower deck.
It was even colder down here than on the deck.
Black-silver sealing wax crept all over the damp wooden planks, and dozens of thin threads emerged from the cracks in the walls, ultimately connecting to an old wooden bed at the end of the cabin.
Robert lay there.
His clothes still carried the dampness of seawater, his eyes were tightly shut, and his face was ash-gray.
The sealing wax crept along the edge of the bed up to his hands and feet, binding him tightly to the entire Moon-Returning Boat.
Elias walked to the bedside and reached out to pat his face.
“Robert?”
There was no response.
Not even his eyelids twitched.
“Don't force him awake,” Theolan's warning immediately echoed in his mind.
“He is currently the navigator of the Moon-Returning Boat, and the living anchor that all one hundred and thirty-six memory connections are attached to.”
“Once his consciousness is forcefully pulled back to reality, all connections will break simultaneously.”
Elias stopped his hand, which had been poised to pat the man's face a couple more times.
“So even though we're clearly inside a shared dream right now, he can still keep dreaming?” Elias asked.
“What is this, Inception?”
“The spirit world has always had more than one layer,” Theolan answered seriously. “When a person is in a dream, they can naturally fall into an even deeper dream.”
“That doesn't sound reassuring at all.” Elias looked down at Robert.
Forcefully waking him wouldn't work, but that didn't mean there was no other way.
He suddenly remembered his experiences after his several Audiences.
Back then, his consciousness hadn't been in his normal sea of consciousness either. Yet, whenever an Audience ended, Old Ed's calls would always penetrate some indefinable layer, drifting intermittently into his Rational Circuit.
Since sound could get in, he might be able to send a message in as well.
Elias pressed his hand against Robert's shoulder.
The Rational Circuit lit up.
【Mental Channel】.
His spirituality did not violently assault the other man's consciousness, but instead traced the edge of that drowsy dream, probing deeper inch by inch.
Elias did not try to control Robert.
He only sent a single, clear message through the channel.
“Turn the helm.”
“Go home.”
At first, there was no response.
Only the residual hum of the Return Bell could be heard in the cabin.
A few breaths later, Robert's finger suddenly twitched.
It was not the result of Elias's manipulation.
What returned from the other end of the channel was not a voice, but a chaotic, exhausted, yet incredibly clear thought.
He wanted to go back.
In the next instant, the heavy grinding of a wooden axle echoed from the deck.
The Dream Helm spun backward on its own!
The entire Moon-Returning Boat shuddered violently, and its bow began to pull away from that black coast.
“It worked!” Theolan's flat voice was unusually raised.
“Don't just report the results, send them back!”
“I'm on it.”
He tightened the black-silver threads one by one.
The dream shadows frozen on the deck began to fade, their memories flowing along the connections back to their original owners in the Third Relief Shelter.
The woman serving the soup took one last look toward the cabin.
“The fish soup is ready.” Her voice was very soft.
In the next instant, the projection dissolved into a shimmer of black-silver light.
The child cradling the wooden boat waved at an invisible mother.
The person singing across the sea also vanished as the last line of the nursery rhyme fell.
One after another.
There were no cries, no true reunions.
These figures, stitched together from memories, merely repeated the very words the living were most reluctant to forget.
Standing beside Robert's bed, Elias suddenly recalled the words his mother had said to him before the illusion shattered: “Come back soon.”
He made no sound.
He simply pulled his hand back from Robert's shoulder.
In the distance, the door of the Lightless Lighthouse slammed shut.
The Dream-Summoning Circuit behind the door, which had only lit up halfway, quickly went dark. The pale threads snapped one after another, and the black coast began to recede from their sight.
The shared dream detached from reality.
By the time Elias could see his surroundings clearly again, the dream hull on the outer layer of the Moon-Returning Boat had receded like the tide. All that remained was an old ferry, gently bumping against the pier of the White Dike sea burial ground.
Robert was still in a deep sleep.
Elliot was also sleeping quite peacefully.
After the two of them carried them ashore, they found themselves in a dilemma looking at the two living men on the ground.
“Wait a moment,” Theolan said, taking out his holy emblem. “I'll have the church send someone over.”
“No,” Elias said, taking out his pocket watch and glancing at it.
Only one hour and forty-seven minutes remained before the 【Moon Gate】 closed.
And his commission fee hadn't even been settled yet!
“I'm on a tight schedule.” He snapped his pocket watch shut and bent down to hoist one of Robert's arms over his shoulder. “We carry them ourselves.”
Theolan looked at Robert, then at the unconscious Elliot.
“Won't we look a bit strange walking down the street like this?”
“You have a holy emblem hanging on your chest, and I have investigation documents in my coat,” Elias said. “As long as we walk with confidence, it's everyone else who will be suspected.”
As it turned out, confidence wasn't all-powerful.
When they hailed a public carriage, the driver stared at the two unconscious men at their feet for a full ten seconds.
“Gentlemen,” the driver said, holding the reins cautiously. “I just drive a carriage. I don't handle corpses.”
“They're both alive,” Elias said, handing over the investigation documents. “One is a suspect, and the other is a missing person.”
“Why are they both asleep?”
“They had a long night.”
In the end, it was only after Theolan showed his crescent holy emblem that the driver reluctantly allowed them to lift the men into the carriage.
Along the way, the driver kept glancing back every so often.
It was as if the moment he looked away, his carriage would transform from public transit into a kidnapping scene.
By the time they rushed back to the Third Relief Shelter, changes had already taken place inside.
The elderly sailor clutched his wife's brooch tightly, repeating the same name over and over.
“Molly.”
“Her name is Molly Banks.”
This time, he didn't ask who Molly was.
The mother who had forgotten her son's face held the drawing paper, her hands trembling as she drew in a small mole on the child's left cheek.
The dockworker sat on the edge of the bed, softly humming the song his younger brother used to sing when they were kids.
The memories they had lost had all returned.
After examining several of the wounded, Dr. Hall's shoulders, which had been tense all night, finally relaxed.
She walked to the table, signed her name in the confirmation column for Phase Three of the commission document, and stamped it with the shelter's seal.
“The missing person has been found, and the abnormal ritual has been dispelled,” Dr. Hall said. “Phase Three is complete.”
Elias took the document, and the abacus in his mind immediately began to click.
One thousand two hundred gold crowns.
Although he still had to wait for the Society of Freemen to audit it, now that it was down in black and white, even if the money grew legs, it couldn't run very far.
“Pleasure doing business with you, Dr. Hall.”
“I can believe now that you take on commissions regularly,” Dr. Hall said, casting a strange look at the two men who had just been carried in. “Though your methods are a bit suspicious.”
“Justice in the end is still justice,” Elias said, slipping the document into his trench coat.
On the other side, Theolan had already begun searching Elliot's belongings.
From a hidden pocket inside the old man's robe, he pulled out a waterproof paper bag.
The opening of the paper bag was stamped with the crescent holy seal of the Ascetic Society.
Theolan only needed one look before his expression turned solemn.
He pressed his holy emblem against the seal.
As the two moonlight lusters overlapped, a complete spiritual feedback immediately emerged along the edges of the paper bag.
“The holy seal is genuine,” he said. “And the order is genuine too.”
Having just tucked away the commission document, Elias walked back over upon hearing this.
“So that old codger really was acting on orders?”
“No,” Theolan said, quickly scanning the contents of the order. “This only authorizes the expansion of dream sample collection after the disaster. It does not permit him to steal the survivors' memories, let alone kidnap living people or activate the Dream-Summoning Circuit.”
“Well, that's a relief,” Elias said.
Theolan did not respond.
His gaze was frozen on the lower half of the document, his expression gradually stiffening.
“What's wrong?”
“There is an additional command at the bottom.”
“Read it.”
Theolan looked up, staring intently at the free transcendent before him who called himself John Constantine, as if evaluating him for the first time.
Then, he slowly read the lines aloud.
“Should any unregistered Moon Lord pathway anomaly be discovered, bypass the local church and report directly to—Raymond Sage.”
Rate on N.U.
