Chapter 15: The Life-Saving Grace

Ahead of the bow, tilting toward the sea, was nothing but pitch-black void.

They had been lifted who knew how high by the swells, and beneath the waves there seemed to be an endless dark abyss.

"Hold tight!" Lin Qian crouched low, both hands gripping the rudder with all his might.

In that instant, the Fujian junk crested the wave and plunged toward the void.

A moment later, the bow slammed into the sea with a thunderous boom—wood splinters flew in every direction, the entire bow drove into the water, and black seawater surged over the deck.

Just then, the stern dropped, and the bow pitched high out of the sea once more.

The hull smashed through the water with a deafening roar, seawater churning with floating timber cascading off the deck on all sides.

The Fujian junk had escaped death by a hair's breadth, rising again from the sea.

The crew could scarcely believe they were still alive.

"The wind's dying—raise half sail!" Lin Qian shouted.

The sail handlers struggled to their feet and hoisted the sail.

They rode over another dozen or so swells, the wind weakening further still, and Lin Qian ordered the sails raised to full.

They sailed on for who knew how long, until a faint light spread across the eastern sea and the wind and waves gradually subsided.

After another half hour sailing south, the sea lay perfectly calm. The sun rose above the horizon, and the vast sky stretched clear as if washed clean.

The world-destroying hurricane of moments ago seemed never to have existed.

Only the shattered bow and their soaked clothes bore witness to all that had happened the night before.

"Are we dead, or did we make it?"

One of the crewmen asked in a daze.

"Bullshit—you're the one who's dead."

The crewmen exchanged wordless glances, then collapsed onto the deck like slabs of meat stripped from the bone.

As they looked at one another, bewildered smiles slowly spread across their faces.

Only now did Lin Qian feel the fear set in—even a modern sailing vessel built from countless high-precision materials would have struggled to escape a typhoon.

In truth, this typhoon had been within Lin Qian's expectations.

The reason he had chosen to set sail on the twenty-fifth of the third month was precisely because the weather matched the omens of an approaching typhoon.

His original plan had been to use the typhoon to shake off the Spanish pursuit.

The Fujian junk, built entirely of wood, was not easy to sink, and Chinese hard sails could withstand storms far better than lateen sails, Bermuda sails, or soft sails.

Even back when the cargo was being loaded, Lin Qian had been preparing to ride out the storm.

He hadn't had the holds filled to capacity; instead, each compartment had a single layer of cargo laid flat against the hull, serving the function of ballast stones, effectively lowering the junk's center of gravity—that was the only reason it hadn't capsized in the giant waves.

Due to the Coriolis effect, typhoon winds in the Northern Hemisphere rotate counterclockwise.

Thus, when the wind at sea shifted from southeast to northwest, Lin Qian knew they had entered the typhoon's southwestern quadrant.

And the typhoon paths across all of East Asia generally move from southeast to northwest.

So Lin Qian sailing south was the fastest way to break away from the typhoon.

In other words, everything Lin Qian did looked terrifying and reckless, but was in fact all part of a meticulously calculated plan.

Facing a typhoon—the most violent force in the natural world—courage alone or wisdom alone would never be enough to survive.

Recalling the wonders he had seen in the typhoon hours earlier—waterspouts, colossal waves—Lin Qian felt as though he had lived through an entire lifetime in a single night.

And because so much adrenaline had been pumping through him, Lin Qian now found both arms that had been steering trembling uncontrollably, his whole body weak as water.

He called over a crewman to take the helm and leaned against the stern rail to rest.

Facing the beautiful sight of the rising sun, Lin Qian thought only that a cup of coffee would make it perfect.

Chen Jiao gazed at Lin Qian from a distance, his expression complicated. Others might not know how difficult it had been to cross that typhoon, but he understood it all too well.

Legend had it that when the great eunuch Sanbao sailed to the Western Seas back in the day, he too had encountered a typhoon. The fleet had been helpless, able only to drop the Taiping anchor, burn incense and pray to the Heavenly Empress, waiting for the storm to pass on its own.

Something like Lin Qian sailing a ship straight through a storm was simply unheard of.

Looking back now, Lin Qian's refusal to jettison cargo, his tacking against the crosswind, his lowering and raising of sails throughout the typhoon—every single action had been sound and prudent, without the slightest trace of recklessness or impulse.

He himself, on the other hand, had openly defied Lin Qian, contributed nothing but trouble, and done his utmost to hold them back.

At this thought, Chen Jiao felt nothing but shame. He walked heavily to Lin Qian's side.

"Helmsman, I…"

Lin Qian patted his shoulder. "No need to say anything. What matters is that we're alive. Go tally up the casualties and losses."

Though Chen Jiao was more than twenty years Lin Qian's senior and nominally bore the title of elder brother, at this moment he felt not a trace of presumption toward that role. Instead, he was wholly willing to take orders from Lin Qian. He nodded and walked off.

"We actually made it through the typhoon." Catalina muttered in utter disbelief, looking at Lin Qian with a complicated expression.

Spain was the world's number-one maritime power, and in the heart of every young person burned a dream of unfurling sails and racing across the sea.

Catalina had been obsessed with sails and the ocean since childhood, hoping that one day she could win supreme glory on the seas like the great navigators Dias, Columbus, and Vasco da Gama.

Since women weren't allowed on ships, she dressed as a man every day.

No one was willing to teach her navigation, so every week she went to the shipyard to study on her own.

All along, she had believed she already possessed all the knowledge needed for sailing—all she lacked was an opportunity.

But facing the typhoon, she finally understood how far she still had to go.

In the howling wind and lashing rain, her limbs had gone weak and her mind blank.

When the ship plummeted from the crest of a wave, she had even blacked out.

If she hadn't been lashed to the mast, she would surely have been buried at sea by now.

Never mind her—even a captain of the most ancient noble bloodline would have met with a shattered ship and a drowned crew against such a violent Southeast Asian typhoon.

And yet this crude yellow-skinned pig of a pirate had charged straight through the typhoon without a scratch.

She clearly remembered the sight of Lin Qian screaming orders to the crew amid the surging giant waves.

Though she couldn't understand what he was saying, the resolve in his words briefly dispelled the fear in her heart, like a beam of light piercing through leaden clouds.

Lin Qian rested for a moment, his limbs gradually regaining some strength, and he began to grip the ship's rail, inspecting the hull.

Everywhere he passed, all the crew members held their breath, their gazes fixed on him, eyes burning with fervor.

Some boatmen who had been talking lowered their voices as he drew near, their eyes following closely on Lin Qian.

In the boatmen's eyes, whether the Dragon King of the Sea turned over or Third Granny flew into a rage, both were deadly perils with no chance of survival.

When the wind and waves were fiercest, many were so frightened they couldn't move a single step, already counting themselves as dead men in their hearts.

Yet Lin Qian had forcibly snatched the lives of everyone on board back from the Dragon King of the Sea's grasp.

Such a feat was simply unheard of.

Most of the boatmen were extremely superstitious. Had Lin Qian not eaten and slept alongside them on the ship, and had they not known that Lin Qian was also of mortal flesh and blood, there would have been those who believed he was an envoy of Mazu.

"Uncle Chen, you're wounded on the forehead? There's still some golden wound medicine in the hold..." Lin Qian asked with concern as he passed the cook.

In response, the cook Uncle Chen knelt down directly, about to kowtow.

Lin Qian stopped him: "What are you doing?"

Uncle Chen: "Helmsman, this life-saving grace... Old Chen will remember it!"

As soon as he said this, many boatmen around him snapped to their senses and moved to kneel as well.

Lin Qian couldn't stop so many people, so he could only accept the bow from everyone, then said in a clear voice: "We're all on the same ship, having faced life and death together — we are brothers. There's no reason for brothers to kowtow and thank one another. Everyone, rise."

Those who made their living on ships were all strong-willed people, rarely given to sentimentality in daily life. Seeing Lin Qian speak this way, they all felt at ease and rose one after another, their gazes toward Lin Qian filled with even greater respect.

Lin Qian had someone tally the ship's losses.

A moment later, someone came to report: "Helmsman, we've checked. Two brothers were swept away by the storm, the bow is badly damaged, nothing else is lost."

"Mm, record the names of the fallen boatmen. When the chance comes, we must give their families compensation silver," Lin Qian ordered. "Come, let's go look at the bow."

The bow of a Fujian junk is flat, without a bowsprit, and has one fewer spanker sail than a galleon.

But precisely because of this, damage to the bow had little effect on sailing — at most, some seawater would pour backward through the gap into the hold.

Lin Qian called Dumb Huang to lead some men in making simple repairs to the bow, plugging up the gap for now, and waiting until they reached shore to repair it properly.

Next, Lin Qian went to inspect the cargo holds. Most of the holds were intact.

Only one or two cargo holds were flooded with seawater, the cloves and nutmeg loaded within basically written off as a loss, but the chests of silver ingots and silver coins were completely unharmed.

All told, the loss amounted to no more than a thousand taels of silver, well within acceptable limits.

After all, the most important cargo of this voyage was not cloves or nutmeg, nor silver ingots or coins, but that Spanish woman on the mast.

Thinking of this, Lin Qian instructed the boatmen to patch up the leaking holds and salvage the waterlogged cargo.

He himself left the hold and walked toward Catalina.

Drawing near, Lin Qian's eyes suddenly widened, his heart pounding violently.

Before him was a scene of tremendous visual impact.

Yahei

Pink Round

Pen