Salted Fish Chapter 62.2: Posthumous Letter (Part 2)

Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations

Editor: GaeaTiamat

 

Duan FeiZhou covered his mouth and kept his head down as he passed by a group of patrolling soldiers. Their eyes were like searching torchlights, but they didn’t even notice that they had just brushed shoulders with a guy whose whereabouts were extremely suspicious.

The effects of the Phantom Leaf could last a long time. According to Joseph Chester’s ledger entry on the leaf, it lasted forever as long as one didn’t spit it out or swallow it. (Of course, few people lasted that long.) If the effectiveness was broken, all that was required was for the user to remain quiet for a period of time, and it would take effect again.

With the power of the Phantom Leaf, Duan FeiZhou was like a ghost. Convenience was good, but what he needed most at the moment wasn’t convenience. He had to break the secret mind control technique that the fake colonel had cast on the ship.

However, he had no idea where to start. He was under the impression that the mind control occult spells were for one person, like the one Mrs. Q cast on Jack the Ripper. Also when occult practitioners died, the spells they cast were naturally lifted.

Duan FeiZhou speculated that either there was a prop in the world that could control the mind of another person, so that the spell stopped when the practitioner died, or it wasn’t controlled by the will of the practitioner, and therefore the item must be shut down or destroyed to end the spell.

It was that or the fake colonel invented a completely new occult spell, a spell that worked continuously, and that spell must be destroyed in order to release the mind control.

Either way, he must first find the location of the spell to do so. How could he destroy a prop or spell when he didn’t even know where it was hidden?

The only thing Duan FeiZhou could be sure of was that it must be hidden on the airship. And that it had the disadvantage that as long as the controlled person was too far away from it, there was a certain chance they would wake up on their own.

An example was the two soldiers who ‘shot’ the colonel at sea. They had been following Colonel Freeman for a long time, so there was a fake colonel, wouldn’t they find out? The best way to make them shut up, was to control their minds.

However, they suddenly came to their senses on the boat and realized that the colonel in front of them was a fake, and that’s why they tried to kill him. They said “we can’t let you back on the boat.” Indeed, that impostor shouldn’t have been allowed to return to the Wellington to continue to scheme.

Unfortunately, the fake colonel didn’t die. He was an occult practitioner, and had no problem stopping the bullets. What about the fate of the two soldiers? Anyway, Duan FeiZhou never saw them again. They were probably wiped out by the puppets as soon as they returned to the ship.

Duan FeiZhou wasn’t sure why the Wellington didn’t fly to Vienna immediately, but hovered over the island. He speculated that it was to wait for Leviathan to come out of the sea and wipe it out completely. Then he had to solve all this trouble before the Leviathan rose out of the sea, otherwise with the speed of the airship, they would reach Vienna in a few hours. By then it would be too late to say anything.

Subconsciously, he returned to the corridor where his cabin was located. Since he knew this path best, his feet automatically took him back here. He wanted to turn around and leave, to continue searching for the props or spells that the fake colonel had set up, but his feet just didn’t listen to him and led him to Z’s cabin.

Z told him to read the suicide note.

Duan FeiZhou shuddered and pushed the door. Sure enough, it was locked. Then again, he hadn’t expected the cabin portal to be open. He took out the Etheric crystal and wanted to try to melt the lock with the energy inside the crystal, but he balked at the thought of the power the fake colonel had when it released the energy. If his control wasn’t good enough, he might blow up the whole cabin. Then he would never see Z’s last letter.

Those were the last words Z had left in the world.

Duan FeiZhou took a breath and transferred the energy from the Ether crystal into Z’s prosthetic arm. Transferring the energy was much safer than releasing it, and there was no need to worry about blowing anything up.

As soon as he touched the Ether crystal, he was surprised at how much energy it contained. Occult practitioners usually stored mostly solar energy for their energy, usually when they went out in the sun. It was naturally stored energy, and they could be called human-shaped, self-propelled, solar chargers. The speed of storage was slow, but the energy source was stable.

When Duan FeiZhou held the Ether crystal, it felt like he was holding a small sun. The energy in it seemed like it wouldn’t run out. No, it would still be depleted, but the energy was so abundant that storing just a little was as worthless as scooping a spoonful of water out of the ocean.

It was an energy source that could make steam ships fly. No wonder the Committee for Scientific Progress valued and coveted it so much.

After transferring all the energy inside the crystal into the mechanical prosthesis, Duan FeiZhou could finally extract the energy without worrying about triggering any explosion. He carefully melted the door lock and pushed the door in.

Z’s room was always extremely clean and tidy. He didn’t know if it was his personal character, or a habit from his military experience.

Duan FeiZhou pulled out the suitcase from under the bed, opened it and turned to the bottom to find the envelope.

The mere sight of the words “suicide note” on the envelope made his chest hurt so much that he couldn’t breathe.

“Gee, boy. How come you’ve become like this after a few days?” Sword in the Stone began to chatter, “The Nightman died. You no longer have to worry about it. Why you still…Why do you still look so unhappy?“

“Shut up.” Duan FeiZhou said viciously. He opened the envelope with a shudder. There were three pieces of letterhead inside. The first one had a dense writing on it, and talked about how Z’s property would be distributed after his death.

As a Nightman, his property was only the government payroll, which wasn’t much. However, he was the son of a nobleman. His ancestors had fiefs and inheritance, and there was an annual annuity and interest after the inheritance was invested. He returned his ancestral property to the crown, and the wealth at his disposal was donated to a medical foundation in London. In addition, he bequeathed his personal effects to his colleagues. For example, he left a Damascus steel knife to Mr. R. To Xenophon he left a set of the complete works of Sherlock Holmes.

The second piece of paper contained his arrangements for the Abnormal Case Investigation Unit section. He recommended Miss Acheson to succeed as the head of the position, with Mr. N as an auxiliary. He also wrote a few words of advice to each of his fellow Nightmen, encouraging them to continue to do their duty.

The text on the third sheet was much shorter than either of the first two. Only four lines were written.

To someone else,

I hate that you have deceived me.

Thank you for this deception.

How nice it would be to never know the truth for the rest of my life.

Duan FeiZhou felt he should cry, but wonderfully, he couldn’t drop a single tear.

It was as if all the moisture in his body was frozen by the cold Arctic wind at the moment of Z’s descent. After all Z had been through, he didn’t really care that he was an occult practitioner anymore. He just hated himself for being cheated. He hated that he was never treated as a person he could talk to. But if it weren’t for the natural dichotomy between occult practitioners and nightmen, how could Duan FeiZhou want to deceive Z?

If he became an occult practitioner and didn’t have to be hunted down and locked up in the dungeons of Scotland Yard, but could live happily on the island like Mr. Thales, and could support himself with his skills like the Möllen siblings, why would he hide his identity from Z? He folded the paper and put it back into the envelope. Then he tucked the letter into his arms and placed it close to his chest.

It was Z’s suicide note. He wanted to take it back to London.

A strange noise suddenly came from the room next door. Duan FeiZhou looked at the wall. Next door was Simon’s cabin. Simon was dead, so who made that noise? The animal friends he had?

Duan FeiZhou released his sensory tentacles and listened to the noise next door.

Some kind of animal rustled up the wall and burrowed into the vent in one corner of the ceiling. Then it moved down the ventilation duct, towards him.

Duan FeiZhou gripped Sword in the Stone nervously and kept his eyes on his side of the vent. A black snake slid out of the grill gap and dangled in mid-air, hissing and spitting.

Well. Now Duan FeiZhou knew what the animal hiding under Simon’s bed was. The Phantom Leaf didn’t work on the animal, so the snake’s yellow eyes gazed intently at him. Then it waved its head at him and burrowed back into the vent.

“What does it mean?” Duan FeiZhou couldn’t resist asking.

“I think,” Sword in the Stone said lazily. “That it wants you to follow it.“

Duan FeiZhou stood motionless. He wasn’t sure what the snake wanted. Maybe the snake had no idea, and was just curious if he would come along. After a while, the snake poked its head out of the vent again, and hissed at him a few times. As if it had seen him there for half a day with no response, and was urging him to say a few words.

Duan FeiZhou didn’t know the snake’s language, but from what he saw, he could only understand that the snake wanted to take him somewhere. He used an occult technique to remove the grill of the vent, put Sword in the Stone on his back, then tucked the mechanical prosthetic into his belt. The ceiling of the airship was very short, so he got over the edge of the vent with a slight leap, and climbed into the pipe.

The pipe was very narrow, and only one person could creep forward. Duan FeiZhou crawled forward on his hands and knees, while the sound of snake scales as they rubbed against metal came from ahead. The snake swam through the pipe much faster than he could. Whenever the snake felt that he was lagging behind, it would stop and wait for a while.

Duan FeiZhou followed the snake around one fork after another, and crawled through one vent after another. Through the grills, the view from beneath was unobstructed. In one room, the crew was snoring. In another room, soldiers were going through their daily exercise under the supervision of their officers. In another room, a dozen crew members sat on crates and argued seriously about something. Words like “captain” and “want a statement” drifted into his ears.

The snake led him to a vertical ventilation shaft. Duan FeiZhou smelled a faint stench coming from below, and he couldn’t mistake it. It was the stench of a corpse. He climbed down the ladder. The snake led him all the way to the bottom, and then into a horizontal pipe. Sword in the Stone kept hitting the pipe and screaming.

After a lot of work, the pipe finally reached the end. Duan FeiZhou climbed up to the grate and took it off with a blast. He squeezed himself out of the pipe like toothpaste.

Duan FeiZhou had to use an occult technique to create a temporary artificial light source. This was very energy-intensive, but he had plenty of energy now. He was in the lowest level of the airship, which was like an equipment room for all kinds of machinery. The rumbling sound of machinery running crashed through Duan FeiZhou’s eardrums.

The snake rustled away, and Duan FeiZhou followed it. They went around to the back of a machine, and before their eyes appeared three bodies lying on the ground.

The two men closest to Duan FeiZhou he knew were soldiers who had accompanied the colonel on his row to the island. Both of them had been dead for a long time. One of them had a bullet hole in his eyebrow, and the other one had half of the back of his head blown off.

Duan FeiZhou guessed correctly that the two soldiers who had managed to break the spell weren’t given heroic treatments when they returned to the airship, but were executed at the first opportunity.

The third corpse had its back to him and its hands were firmly tied behind its back.

He walked towards the corpse, touched the other man’s shoulder lightly, and then jerked his hand back. It was not a corpse, but a living person. The body was still warm, still breathing. Duan FeiZhou gently turned the man around, and placed him in a flat position. Then he witnessed a scene that could only occur in a nightmare.

–The man had no face.

Except for the mouth, the five senses were gone, the face had bumpy and undulating places all just covered with a layer of skin, like a mannequin that hadn’t yet been carved out completely. His mouth wasn’t a human mouth. It was more like a hole for breathing and eating.

The man was wearing a military uniform, and his shoulder patch showed that he was a colonel. There was only one colonel on the entire Wellington. 

 

Z had fallen into the sea. 

Falling overboard from that height was almost like slapping your whole body on the ice. If he didn’t have a low perception of pain, every inch of his body would be screaming in agony. 

After he sank into the water, he felt much better. He was also very insensitive to the perception of hot and cold, so he didn’t feel how harsh the seawater was. On the contrary, the water gently wrapped around him and submerged his body, just like a mother who never rejected her children, and always took them into her arms.

It was so dark under the water that he couldn’t see anything. However, something was pulsating in his chest, rising and falling, like a heart beating. It was strange, as he obviously no longer had a heart.

Deep, deep below him, something else was pulsing with his “heartbeat.”

Pounding. Pounding. Pounding.

The frequencies merged as one. As if they were one. 

He looked down into the endless abyss.

In the abyss, a blood-colored eye slowly opened and met his gaze.

At that moment, he suddenly understood. Without any words or gestures, just though the meeting of eyes, he read the other party’s meaning.

—So you have Ether Crystals inside you as well.