Falling into the Abyss

Ethan and Samuel stared at the priest and said, “Huh? Who?”

Tanisiel repeated slowly in a very patient tone, “I said, my father was the Eve king’s brother, the Duke of the Western River.”

”Then you’re the Eve king’s nephew! My god, you’re a motherfucking prince!” Samuel looked up and down at the priest in disbelief. “No wonder you’re bold enough to take an escaped prisoner to the Eves’ planet, since you can go back to being a Duke after you’re expelled!”

Tanisiel turned his head and said innocently, “However, my parents are not alive now, and I accepted the purification ceremony a long time ago. I will give everything to the Lord in this life, so I haven’t had the right to inherit for a long time.”

“But you still have royal blood in you!” With a look of “I don’t care, you are a local tyrant” on his face, Samuel held his arm and said with a smile, “I thought that if we were found out, we might be sent back. Now, it seems that we don’t have to worry too much.”

“Don’t be too optimistic.” Tanisiel became more serious and said, “I said not to overestimate the privilege my identity brings me. Previously, I embezzled and damaged the God of Order’s eggs and disobeyed the orders of my superior many times, and I have been punished. I took a great risk to take you both out this time. You have to listen to me for every matter. Don’t do anything I don’t want you to do.”

Ethan covered Samuel’s mouth when he still wanted to rebuke the priest and said to Tanisiel, “We will act according to your arrangements.”

When their spaceship entered the territory of the Eves, they received a communication request from the border administration. At that time, Ethan and Samuel hid from the spaceship monitoring system in its blind spot, the bathroom. They acted according to Tanisiel’s instructions so that Tanisiel could say he came back alone.

Their plan was to park at a relatively remote Eve space station first, since Tanisiel needed to buy some camouflage items on the black market. Ethan and Samuel didn’t even leave the spaceship during the whole process. They locked themselves in the dark spaceship and waited for Tanisiel to come back. Samuel grew extremely silent and locked himself in his room every day. Ethan didn’t know what he was doing.

Ethan, with the data protection firewall, browsed the news on the ship’s computer. In the past, all the news in the Earth Union was censored and filtered. Now that he left, he entered the web that he had only heard before but never had a chance to really see. Now, he knew that the Earth Union was not very peaceful. First, the experiment on Neptune caused a large area to be infected by the laws of the second universe, which spread to the space station near Neptune at that time. It was said that many people died because of the late discovery. Ethan couldn’t imagine how those people died. At that time, in the space station, he watched the steel buildings rapidly twist and melt as space got cut to pieces, and the man’s head twisted and deformed, his brain pulled out of his nostrils like noodles.

There was no report of such a great disaster in the territory of the Earth Union, which was obviously blocked by the military. Now that the infected area was under control, no one knew what was going on inside, and no one knew if there were any survivors.

His most popular prophecy was the coming of the Great Evil God. That was because a terrifying mutated person had massacred the prisoners in the Forbidden City.

It was in that report that Ethan saw his own face. It was a picture of him when he was still Secretary of the Energy Bureau, wearing a tailored suit shirt with his hair parted neatly and fixed with hairspray, and he was wearing a pair of expensive, fine framed glasses. No one would think that such a gentle-looking Beta was a mutant monster.

Ethan didn’t expect that he had become missionary material of the Lord Grace Association. He only felt dumbfounded.

It was clearly them who forced him to turn into that……

Tanisiel returned wearing a dark gray cloak and hood with a large box in his hand. After opening it, they saw some Eve costumes and many strange fluids inside. It looked like a Frankenstein’s box. Tanisiel took out some fake pointed ears and messy bottles and cans, saying they were all materials used by professional reality TV makeup artists. Sticking them on their ears would allow them to look like real Eves. As long as they did not get close to someone, no one would be able to tell at all.

The priest forced Ethan to change into an Eve-style dark green velvet jacket with delicate pale gold threads around his waist and white trousers with dark patterns along his legs. Then, he was pressed onto the chair by the priest again, and the priest worked hard on his ears and face for a long time. The priest nodded with satisfaction and asked Ethan to stand in front of the mirror to look at himself with some pride. After a glimpse, Ethan felt he was mistaken. His skin now looked a little morbidly pale. With his two pointed ears and the third eye, he looked like an Eve. Additionally, Tanisiel sandwiched a thing that looked like an earring stud onto each of his ears. In fact, they were two small pseudo projectors, from which a light beam that could hardly be detected by the naked eye would be projected, creating a thin layer on his face and slightly changing the shape of his facial features. At this time, Ethan couldn’t recognize himself in the mirror. He opened his eyes wide in shock, and the slender eyes in the mirror mirrored him. An Eve boy who was less than 20 years old appeared in front of him.

He completely couldn’t tell that he was already 30 years old……

The priest’s explanation for this was that the average human height was shorter than that of the Eves, so it would be less suspicious for him to pretend to be young.

Samuel also had an expression as though he saw a magic trick, and he somewhat hesitantly looked at the similar “earring stud” lying in his palm. Fortunately, this disguise prop could only be bought in the black market. Otherwise, they were afraid they would not know whether other people’s faces were real or fake when walking on the streets.

“Remember to wear something on your ears when you go out,” Tanisiel instructed, “I’ll tell others that both of you are my apprentices while I’m away. When I’m gone, you should learn the mannerisms both of you should have when facing me and call me ‘Tutor’.”

Around the clock, Tanisiel taught Ethan and Samuel some basic etiquette for priests, as well as simple Eve language. Ethan learned very quickly. Although he was not very proficient in the language, he could basically muddle through with the help of the vocal translator. However, Samuel’s learning speed was much slower, as he was not very good at it. In the end, Tanisiel gave up and decided to let him act dumb and not talk.

A week later, they finally saw the Eves’ planet from a distance.

It was really a beautiful planet, surrounded by a layer of purple light that formed a fantasy-like scene. Large pieces of beautiful land floated in the middle of the blue and purple waters. It was surrounded by a dark purple planetary ring, which was orbiting slowly, like the skirt of a ballerina. The two satellites, which were probably smaller than the moon, were dancing around in different orbits.

It was slightly larger than Earth, and it took about 28 hours for it to make a full turn and 452 days to revolve around the beautiful red giant. There were more and more spaceships in orbit. The shape of those spaceships was obviously different from the rounded spaceship style of Earth. The lines were smooth and slender, like silver whales swimming in the vast sea of the universe.

The spaceships merged into orbit around the planet and circled halfway around the planet before arriving at the preset position, where they began the landing propulsion program. The ship roared through the thick, lavender atmosphere, emitting a cold blue diagonal line. They fell into the vast peacock blue ocean, which was the nearest landing point for the city of Siloan, the capital of the Eves. The spaceship floated in the sea for a while, joining the many small dish-like objects floating in the waters. The ships were generally arranged like duckweed at the exit of the spaceship, extending towards the land not far away.

The door opened slowly, and Ethan held his breath when he saw the beautiful sky that seemed to be dancing in the sunset forever. In the distance, the white city rose and fell on the slopes of the mountains. At the edge of the sky, the semicircular planetary wheel that spanned across half of the sky refracted thousands of beautiful colors, dyeing the clouds. The scenery appeared like an artwork in the impressionist style.

It was a gorgeous and surreal planet. For some inexplicable reason, it matched with Tanisiel’s appearance……

They followed the “duckweed” covering the sea towards the shore, where there were several spaceships on both sides floating silently on the sea, like sleeping sea monsters. In the harbor, a broad ladder rose from the sea and led them to a white stone bridge extending somewhere above the sea. On the right side of the stone bridge, there was a white statue that was taller than the bridge, depicting an old man with a long beard and a long robe. On the other side of the bridge was a black statue. The man’s clothing looked like an Egyptian Pharaoh’s, but if one looked at it carefully, it was different.

Ethan didn’t know why, but the black figure made him feel uneasy. He always felt a kind of unpleasant familiarity looking at it.

As he stepped on the stone steps, Tanisiel pulled up the gray hood and didn’t seem to want to be noticed. In order to prevent someone from picking him up or monitoring him, he specially accelerated their trip and arrived one day earlier than expected. Ethan also pulled up the hood on his cloak, and only Samuel followed indifferently. Anyway, with the pseudo-realistic projection camouflaging his ears, he didn’t feel afraid.

This was the first time Ethan had seen so many Eves. Accustomed to the priest’s expression that was rid of worldly cares, he suddenly felt a subtle sense of disillusionment when he saw the Eves squeezing in the crowd like humans in the market, haggling with small vendors, and swaggering around the market in small groups. Seeing the Eves act in such a way extinguished his illusion. However, it was undeniable that the Eves acted in a calm and peaceful manner. Even when quarreling, they seemed to retain more of their senses and calm.

The Eve cities were very different from those of human beings. They wouldn’t build the buildings very tall, and they liked to use curving and complex architecture. The entire city was as moving as a poem as it rose and fell. There were much fewer vehicles shuttling through the air orbit tracks than on Earth’s stations, where the dual-use vehicles were incessantly flowing through, and a traffic jam wouldn’t occur.

Ethan looked around wide-eyed throughout the journey, his heart full of wonder. In his imagination, the city was always gray, and the atmosphere of the space station was always gloomy. After entering the Forbidden City, this impression became even stronger, and he felt a sense of hopeless disgust there. He had never seen a city that was so full of vitality and color……

Tanisiel hailed for an autopilot vehicle and pushed Ethan and Samuel in. He sat in the front seat and said in the Eves’ language, “To May Lake Manor.”

Ethan barely understood and asked, “What manor? Aren’t we going to the temple?”

“I need to go back to the temple and arrange for something before I can consider bringing you guys over. May Lake Manor is in my father’s fiefdom and is where I lived when I was a child. You will be safe there.” The priest sitting in the front seat looked back and gave him a smile. “Are you excited to go home with me?”

The author has something to say:

In the next chapter, we would enter the ‘Ghost Castle’, I don’t know if Ethan’s father-in-law will climb out of the grave to see ‘daughter-in-law’~~

T/N: Ethan and Samuel's first meeting (ABYSS) by Alya:

Thank you everyone for reading and supporting ABYSS!