Deep Sea Ember

Chapter 41 The Antique Shop

The interior of

this antique shop was just as Duncan had guessed - it was full of clutter, decadence, and bleak business, and even just looking at the dust piling up near the window, visitors could imagine how bad the owner had made his life be.

The first thing he saw was the storage table near the walls on both sides, on which were large vases, sculptures and incomprehensible totems, and the wall behind the storage table was lattice, which was used to place smaller "goods", and the counter was located directly opposite the door, which was a long bar, and the shelves behind the counter were also a little dusty, filled with dark-toned picture frames and small ornaments.

Behind the counter, you can also see a staircase leading to the second floor, which is gloomy and cannot see the structure clearly for the time being.

There is also a small door under the stairs, which, in "memory", should lead to the warehouse at the back of the store - half of the space inside is filled with clutter.

It was hard to imagine that the cultist he was possessed was living in a shop that no one seemed to visit, and even had extra money to worship the priest of the sun god.

Duncan walked to the counter in the depths, the old wooden floor creaked a little, and as he passed the stairs, he noticed the lamp fixed to the wall.

It was an electric light.

Duncan's brows immediately furrowed slightly.

The style of the lamp is unfamiliar, the iron frame and gray lampshade have an exotic feel, but in any case, the structure of the incandescent bulb inside is clear at a glance - the light source of this lamp comes from electricity.

In this world, is electricity already such a common thing? Do ordinary civilians in the lower city also use electric lights in their homes?

So why were the light sources used in the sewers before gas lamps, oil lamps, and torches? Why do the street lamps outside also use gas lamps?

A huge doubt arose, which seemed obviously unreasonable to Duncan, especially in a sewer environment - the presence of open flames, gas lamps using flammable gases, and clean and safe electric lamps had obvious disadvantages!

He

originally thought that technical limitations allowed city managers to use gas lamps as a light source for sewers, but now it seems that ...... At least in the city-state of Prade, technology has long developed to the level where electricity enters the homes of ordinary people!

A huge sense of incongruity filled Duncan's heart, and he tried to search for the corresponding knowledge from the memory fragments in his mind, but only got the answers "this is common sense" and "urban planning is like this".

It seems that either the knowledge in this area is not made public to the public, so that the cultist he possesses does not know anything about it, or the knowledge in this area is too basic, so that it does not leave a strong enough impression in the mind of this cultist, causing his corresponding memories to quickly fade after death, leaving only the impression of "natural".

With a temporarily unsolvable confusion in his heart, Duncan reached out and turned on the light—with a soft click of a switch, the bright light immediately illuminated the area near the stairs and counters.

There is also a switch on the opposite wall to control the lights in other areas of the store on the first floor, but Duncan doesn't plan to move it for now.

In the dead of night, a small light is lit in an antique shop that is already closed, which can be explained by "the owner gets up and walks around at night", but suddenly the lights are bright and may attract unnecessary attention.

With the limited light near the stairs, Duncan's gaze first swept over the nearest goods, and the first thing that caught his eye was a wooden carved totem-like object less than half a meter high, with a wooden totem painted with red and blue pigments depicting strange face patterns, and next to it were antique vases that were supposed to be ceramic - they had price tags in front of them, and the price tags were marked with outrageous prices.

The original price is 420,000 yuan, and the discount is 306.

There was such a momentum of self-abandonment.

Duncan's gaze quickly looked away and swept across the entire store.

Whenever there was a real thing here, he would let the lost country scare the city wall of Plande.

Fake can no longer be fake, no real collector needs to appraise it, just find a normal intelligence who will not believe that this antique store in the lower city will sell real antiques - the person who can really turn up antiques will open a market in such a slum? I'm afraid the longest thing in the whole store isn't the sign at the door......

But Duncan was not surprised by the existence of this store itself - the owner knew that he was selling fake things, and the people who came here to buy things did not expect to actually put a thousand-year-old statue in their homes.

After all, there are still jadeite sellers under the overpass on the earth, ninety-eight a bracelet is known as the old pit ice seed, and if you wear it home, you accidentally bump the door frame and the glass ballast can fall to the ground - don't you know what's going on?

Duncan was not interested in the bad life of the owner of this shop, he only focused on one thing: this place should be his first "landing" on land as the captain of the Lost Home.

An "outpost" for understanding the land world and understanding modern civilized society.

He had secretly made a decision to maintain his current body as much as possible as long as the conditions of "walking in the spirit world" permitted, and to use this "antique shop" as a cover to act in the city-state of Prade, and if the training of Ai went smoothly afterwards, if Ai could really transfer "physical objects" between the Lost Homeland and Prand in a stable and controlled manner, this antique shop would also become a secret material transit warehouse.

Duncan came to the back of the counter, sat on a chair, carefully combing through the memory fragments in his mind, and scrutinized all the places that might cause hidden dangers.

Due to the continuous crackdown on cult activities by the city-state authorities, the living space of the Sun God believers in Prade City has been compressed to the limit, and their member contacts are extremely cautious, except for wearing full-coverage hoods and masks when attending any gathering, many of the bottom members have only one or two specific contacts with the upper echelons of the church "Joint", this is undoubtedly a good thing for Duncan today -

this means that even within the cultist, only that person knows the real identity and contact information of "him", and once this person is gone, then no one knows "his" ulterior identity as a heretic.

He can walk upright in front of the managers of the city-state, and his identity is an innocent and good citizen.

And the better news is that after carefully combing through his memory, Duncan is sure that this biggest hidden danger has actually disappeared.

Because the connector of "him" was one of the three black-robed cultists he saw when he first woke up......

Those three unlucky bastards have been pigeons.

He relaxed a little and sat in a more comfortable position in his chair.

After the biggest hidden danger disappeared, if there was anything else to worry about, it was the other Sun God believers who held sacrificial ceremonies in the underground assembly hall before, and the larger and more mysterious and dangerous Sun God Church behind those believers.

If the memory in my mind is correct, the Prade city-state had dealt a severe blow to the Sun God Church entrenched in the city four years ago, and since then this heretical belief has collapsed in the city-state, not to mention any ceremonies they hold, and it is already a thank thanks that they can hide themselves well on weekdays and not be caught by the church guards.

But now, these extremely low-key cultists have done a rather high-profile thing.

The purpose of the sacrificial ceremony was to please the gods, and the other purpose was to gather power or enhance the influence of the gods on the real world - the cultists in the assembly hall at that time, even the priest "messenger" who presided over the ceremony, could only be regarded as the grassroots members of the Sun God Church.

There were not too many memory fragments in Duncan's mind, and it was even more impossible for a grassroots cultist to come into contact with the core secrets of the church, but just by reasoning from the existing intelligence, he could also guess that those cultists who suddenly came to life should have been instructed by a higher level.

The heretical sect that worships the "true sun god"...... They wanted to do something big in Plande, and the sacrificial ritual that was accidentally stirred up by themselves was probably just the most insignificant splash before this big event began.

Duncan didn't have any feelings for this "Pland City-State", but if he wanted to develop from here, he had to think about what impact a group of madmen like the "Sun Gods" would have on him in the city-state.