Chapter 851: Depth -1, To the New World
Deep Sea Embers (Chinese: 深海余烬, Shēnhǎi Yújìn) is a popular web novel by Yuan Tong. It is a masterful blend of Cosmic Horror (Lovecraftian), Steampunk, and Supernatural Mystery.
On that day, the fog blocked everything. On that day, he became the captain of a ghost ship.
On that day, he stepped through the thick fog and confronted a completely subverted and fragmented world—the old order had vanished, strange phenomonoms dominated the endless seas beyond civilized society, and isolated island city-states and fleets of ships challenged the sea that had become the last ember of lights for the civilized world.
All of this while the shadows of the old days were still stirring in the deep sea, waiting to to devour this world that was about to die.
But for the new captain of the ghost ship Vanished, there was only one question he had to consider first— Who knows how to drive this ship?!
The Premise
The story follows Zhou Ming, a history teacher from modern Earth. He finds himself transported into a terrifying world of endless oceans and supernatural fog. He inhabits the body of Duncan Abnomar, the legendary and feared captain of the ghost ship The Vanished.
The World: Humanity lives on isolated city-states across a vast ocean. The sun is a pale remnant, and the waters are infested with “Anomalies” and “Visions” – entities that defy logic and sanity.
The Mission: As “Captain Duncan,” Zhou Ming must hide his true identity while navigating a world where even thinking about the wrong thing can drive you mad. He gathers a crew of outcasts to uncover the truth behind the “Great Collapse” and the dying embers of civilization.
Prologue
The boundless fog rolled thickly outside the window to the point where the outside world seemed to disappear from the other side, leaving only the chaotic, unclear light that somehow managed to penetrate into this house. It’s through this dimness that light got maintained in this eerie silence.
In the slightly messy single apartment, Zhou Ming was lying at his desk with a long pile of debris sprawled across the surface. His condition could only be described as haggard while he wrote in his diary book:
“Nothing’s changed on the seventh day, and a thick fog had enveloped the outside. I do not know how, but an unknown force locked the window and deprived me of prying it open. The whole room seemed to have been ‘cast’ into an isolated space by something….”
“I can’t contact the outside world either. The electricity got cut off since the beginning, along with the water tap that didn’t flow. Strangely, the lights worked, and the computer kept running – I ripped the cord out of the wall to see….”
As if a slight breeze suddenly blew in from the window, Zhou Ming jerked up from his act of burying into the diary and looked up with those haggard eyes. Unfortunately, the noise was nothing more than his own illusion. There was no change, only the never-ending movement of the lingering fog outside the window and the eerie silence of his isolated dwelling in the apartment.
Then his sight fell upon the windowsill where he had left the wrenches and hammers – there are still traces of his attempts in the last seven days to pry open the glass. But now, these tools are nothing more than mocking evidence of failure.
After a few seconds, Zhou Ming’s expression became calm again—with this unusual calmness, he lowered his head again and returned to his writing:
“I am trapped with no clue how to escape. I even thought of tearing apart the roof and walls in the past few days. But after expending all my strength and ideas, I couldn’t make so much as a dent in these walls. It’s as if the walls were a box, and I’m the mouse trapped inside this box with no way out….”
“The exception being that door.”
“But the situation outside that door… it’s even more wrong.”Zhou Ming stopped again, slowly examining the handwriting he had left behind on the page before flipping back to the content he had written days ago. These were heavy and suppressed words, meaningless thoughts, irritable graffiti, and awkward jokes written when he forcibly relaxed his mind to avoid going insane.
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