We Must Go Back!!!

“It seems the margin of error is a tiny bit too large. It looks like this isn't the first time I've woken you up either. Best of luck.” Chris said a few words and then went silent.

While Ryan was still lost in thought, a heavy thud of footsteps on wooden planks suddenly echoed from deep within the cabin behind them.

Ryan turned around with lightning speed, holding his dagger across his chest. Simon and Alvin also fanned out, the extraordinary aura within their bodies exploding without reservation at this moment, their eyes locked onto the pitch-black wooden door leading to the lower deck.

Three figures walked out of the shadows, step by step.

It was themselves.

More precisely, they were the "Ryan, Simon, and Alvin" from failed timelines—three entities who had been polluted by the occult and brutally tortured by despair and time until they no longer looked human.

The "Ryan" leading the way had his clothes reduced to tattered rags long ago in countless storms. His face was mangled and incomplete, the flesh on most of his right cheek melted away to expose the pale jawbone beneath. His eyes, at this moment, were like two high-intensity fog lamps, pouring out a blinding, tyrannical, and utterly irrational pure white glow.

On the left, "Simon" had no skin over his wide-open chest. His ribs flared outward bizarrely, exposing a massive 【Heart】 coated in black slime completely to the air. It pulsed with a dull, incredibly stubborn rhythm that synchronized with the tides of the black sea, as if he possessed a frenzied vitality that would never die, yet could never be set free.

On the right was "Alvin." The left half of his body had completely rusted over, covered in dark red, shriveled scabs. With every movement he made, a grating friction squealed between his joints and muscles.

“We finally found you,” the polluted version of Ryan spoke.

“This time... it's our turn to leave.”

“You're already dead,” the real Simon said through gritted teeth.

“Dead? In this rift, who can define death?” the polluted Alvin rasped. “We've been trapped in different timelines, watching the sun outside draw closer bit by bit, watching our own flesh turn to rust and bone ash. We can no longer tell what is real, what is the past, and what is the future.”

The polluted Ryan took a step forward. The glow in his eyes suddenly flared, illuminating the entire wheelhouse like the polar day.

“But we know one thing. If we kill you at this node and cover our white bones with your flesh, which hasn't been completely polluted yet, we can take your place and return to the true reality.”

“You are nothing but dregs unwilling to fade away,” Ryan said coldly. The faint light in his left eye struggled to maintain a pocket of clarity amidst the blinding pure white glare. “You clever people who thought you found a way out have gone completely mad.”

“Then let's see who the real dregs are.”

“No need for useless words. Just kill them, Simon!” both Ryans spoke at the same time.

The battle erupted in an instant.

The cramped space of the wheelhouse was instantly shattered by the overflowing spirituality. This was a battle of trapped beasts, where every single strike came at the very real cost of torn flesh and agonizing pain of the soul.

The polluted Simon was like a moving boulder, charging right through the Edge light swung by Simon. His 【Heart】 Principle was too pure; that exposed heart released an almost savage field of vitality amidst its frantic beating. Any wound inflicted upon him would sprout thick, sticky granulation tissue and forcefully heal in the very next second.

Simon's dagger pierced his abdomen, but the polluted Simon didn't even flinch. He swung his hand back in a heavy punch that smashed violently into Simon's cheek. The sound of fracturing bone was clearly audible. Simon was sent flying backward, crashing through the deck railing and tumbling into the freezing black seawater together with his opponent.

On the other side, the two Alvins slammed into each other in the center of the deck.

“You think that ragged little boat you built can take you away?” the polluted Alvin shrieked hysterically, dark red scabs flaking off his face. “It will fall apart! In this vast ocean, it won't even last three days! Give me your body!”

Alvin said nothing. He only gritted his teeth as the fire of the Forge within his body began to spontaneously reshape his finger bones under extreme pressure. He let go of his crowbar, allowing his opponent's arm to slam into his shoulder and tear away a large chunk of flesh. At the same time, his hands locked onto the other's torso with deathly force, pouring the last trace of the destructive spirituality of the Forge within him directly into his opponent.

"Boom!"

Accompanied by a grating sound of snapping metal, both Alvins coughed up blood simultaneously and fell backward.

And on the upper deck, the two Ryans were engaged in the most perilous battle of minds.

The glow in the polluted Ryan's eyes was a double-edged sword. A mental pollution of such intensity was not only burning the real Ryan, but also crazily evaporating whatever remained of his own sanity.

“Look at it! This is the truth of time! East Port does not exist! We are all dead!” The polluted Ryan laughed maniacally, his skeletal hand clamping down hard on Ryan's head as he tried to pour all of the despairing memories in his mind into Ryan's vessel of consciousness.

Endless screams, the agonizing pain of melting, and the images of Simon and Alvin dying before his eyes over and over again rushed into Ryan's mind like an overwhelming tide.

Blood began to seep from Ryan's eyes, nose, ears, and mouth. His defense line of sanity trembled violently on the verge of collapse.

But at this very moment, a voice echoed in his mind.

“Extinguish the light.”

Ryan closed his eyes. He stopped channeling the glow in his left eye, forcefully extinguishing all the extraordinary power in his body, and broke free from his opponent's grip with a violent surge.

The surroundings instantly plunged into absolute darkness.

In that split second, the polluted Ryan's pure white glow lost its target of attraction, venting and tearing wildly into the void.

With his eyes closed in the darkness, Ryan drew his bone blade and took a step forward.

The short dagger in his hand originally possessed no occult properties, but at this moment, it took on a trace of imitated Edge sharpness.

The cold blade pierced precisely into the opponent's shriveled throat, and then twisted viciously.

By the time the battle quieted down, the thick fog over the sea seemed to have grown even denser.

The deck of the East Port had completely collapsed. The real Simon crawled up from the black seawater, his left cheek swollen high as he gasped heavily for air. Alvin lay amidst the wooden splinters, his left shoulder a bloody mess.

Before them, the corpses of their three past selves were rapidly weathering at a speed visible to the naked eye.

The dry bones scattered, merging into the bone island beneath their feet, which was built from the accumulation of countless bone fragments.

“Ryan... look over there,” Simon suddenly said in a raspy voice, patting him on the shoulder and pointing out toward the distant sea.

Ryan looked in the direction Simon was pointing.

Deep within the churning grey-white fog, black waves rose and fell. Far across that boundless dead sea, more and more blurry silhouettes of ships were faintly emerging in dense numbers.

Some were three-masted sailing ships with broken masts, some were canoes with only half their hulls remaining, and some were even just a few wooden planks tied together. On every single boat, there seemed to be faint, shadowy figures standing—some had one, some had two or three, and some even had four or five.

“Hoist the sail.” Ryan didn't look at those shadows again. He turned around and walked toward their crooked, extremely crude sailboat.

Alvin struggled to his feet and gripped the rope made from strips of rotted canvas with his right hand. Simon spat out the bloody water in his mouth, and together they pushed the small boat into the black tide.

The small boat rocked violently a few times. The caulking paste let out a faint sizzling sound as it was soaked in seawater, but in the end, it floated shakily on the surface of the black sea.

“Let's go.”