Chapter 169: Sea Song

As the Sea Song ceased navigation, the Star Leaper also came to a stop.

People cautiously observed the Sea Song; during the two years it had vanished, Pen Island and Midy Kingdom had sent countless search teams, none of which found any trace of the Sea Song.

On the day the Sea Song disappeared, the sea surface was calm, with no typhoon or heavy rain, and no reefs or Bingshan along its route.

The only anomaly was a sudden fog at the start of the voyage.

People had proposed many hypotheses about the Sea Song's fate: that it had encountered a massive ocean vortex and sunk straight to the seabed; or that it had accidentally entered a region like the Bermuda Triangle and become trapped within it…

Yet the Sea Song now before them showed not a single scratch on its hull, as if it had never suffered a maritime disaster or sailed through dangerous waters.

No living presence could be felt aboard, yet the lights were fully lit, and just minutes ago it had been moving toward them.

If no one was alive, then what was piloting the ship?

Thinking of this, the passengers on the Star Leaper instinctively held their breath, as if the sound of their breathing might draw the attention of the ghosts haunting the Sea Song.

People were desperate to avoid the suddenly appeared Sea Song, urging the captain to leave immediately, yet the captain insisted on approaching it.

"The ship's communication system is severely damaged; we must board the Sea Song and check whether its system is functional. Even if it isn't, we can salvage undamaged components to attempt repairing our own."

Faced with the captain's reasoning, the crowd could not refuse.

Having just endured a full day of being trapped in a ghostly loop, they clearly understood their situation.

Stranded in the vast ocean, cut off from the outside world, if they continued like this, they might become the next Sea Song.

After brief hesitation, the passengers could only agree to the captain's decision.

But another problem arose.

Who would go?

Even the bravest crew members dared not step onto this eerie ghost ship; as people hesitated, Wu Chang had already ordered the construction of a makeshift gangway and boarded the Sea Song.

After Wu Chang, Li Yubin followed closely behind; this vanished Sea Song concerned the lives of thousands and the truth of what had happened two years ago—she, as a journalist, would not let slip such a major story.

Seeing Wu Chang and Li Yubin board the Sea Song one after another, Park Changmin, the one most expected to exorcise the vessel, also selected five priests to investigate the Sea Song.

One person entering a ghost ship was suicide; many entering together became an expedition.

Especially since Park Changmin kept saying the Lord would protect them, some already bold passengers, swept up in the moment, also boarded the ship.

Among these passengers were several Deep Abyss Game players.

With such a massive clue right before them, they had long been unable to sit still; now, using the crowd as cover, they boarded the ship.

Watching the crowd rush fearlessly toward the Sea Song, the crew felt both moved and ashamed; after their shame, they turned to look at the maintenance engineer, equally ashamed, and their minds briefly froze.

"Wait, come back! You didn't bring the engineer!"

Wu Chang, the first to board the Sea Song, had already begun investigating the ship's condition.

He entered the cabin; the floor and tables were covered in thick dust, and apart from his own and his subordinates' footprints, there were no other traces.

This place had been abandoned for a long time, and no one had entered since.

His goal was to investigate the ship's resentment, so he bypassed the cargo hold and headed first toward the passenger quarters.

Entering the passenger area, the ship's interior grew chaotic: tables and chairs scattered everywhere, as if a violent riot had occurred.

After taking a few steps, he saw a room near the corridor, its door violently shattered, the interior in ruins, with dried, blackened bloodstains on the ceiling and floor, and a faint resentment barely clinging to existence.

Wu Chang's gaze fixed on the resentment; it flared into a flame, and the flickering fire transported him back to the day its owner died.

Fire—he saw through the corridor window flames blazing across the deck.

People gathered around the fire, chanting strange incantations—not Gao Mu language, nor Midy language, but an ancient, guttural tongue.

He could not understand it, yet he somehow knew the meaning of those incantations.

They were celebrating the Lord's gift of food.

The crowd praying around the fire were all bare-chested, each emaciated to skin and bone, their ribs clearly visible when they lifted their chests, their spines protruding when they bent over.

This was a symbol of enduring hunger and fairness; the ship had run out of food for many days, and by stripping bare, they demonstrated their starvation and proved they had not hoarded food.

Seeing their emaciated bodies, he suddenly tasted a delicious flavor in his mouth—the taste of fish soup.

Following that taste, a fragment flashed in his mind: the day before yesterday, the skinny man next door, driven mad by hunger, pulled out the last quarter of a compressed biscuit from his pocket.

Before he could even digest it, his slightly swollen stomach was noticed by the others.

To punish the sin of selfishly hoarding food, they slit open the skinny man, chopped his organs and flesh into pieces, and scattered them into the sea to lure fish.

The fish in this sea seemed to particularly favor the flesh of sinners.

The bait attracted dozens of large fish, but the people were too weak to haul in more than four.

Four fish, divided among one thousand three hundred people.

He received a bowl of fish soup, containing a piece of fish the size of a thumb.

He could swear it was the most delicious fish he had ever eaten in his life—so delicious that even seeing a human body now made him recall that flavor.

He shook his head, snapping himself out of the fantasy; he had to leave, because the people on deck were sharpening their knives.

The fish were gone; they needed new bait to fish again.

He hoped he would not be chosen, because he could not die yet.

Tiptoeing back to his room, he saw forty-three vertical lines carved into the wall with a razor blade—representing the forty-three days they had been trapped aboard.

He picked up the bloodstained razor, preparing to carve the forty-fourth mark, when the boy on the bed woke up, opened his eyes, and asked:

"Dad, did they hand out food today?"

He hesitated, pulled out a small sliver of meat, and whispered: "Yes, but you can't eat it now. When they serve the fish soup tonight, mix it in and drink it."

Thump. Thump. Thump.

The sound of the fishing team passing down the corridor.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The sound of someone knocking on the window.

He looked up and saw the man wearing the captain's hat, grinning wickedly as he stared at them.

The next moment, the sound of a door being smashed came from outside.

"No! You can't do this!" He panicked, trying to block the door, but the wound on his thigh made even standing painful enough to break into sweat—he couldn't exert any strength.

Soon the door was smashed open; he tried to resist, but had no strength to fight back, beaten until his head bled profusely.

The little boy, accused of stealing food, was taken to the deck to serve as today's fish bait.

As for him, he was shoved directly into the galley. The captain looked at the dying man and shook his head: "I told you, anything edible must be shared with everyone on board."

The next moment, he was thrown into a giant soup pot.

As the vision ended, Wu Chang's consciousness returned to the real world.

He clicked his tongue. What a tragic story.

Experiencing the man's life in first person was utterly awful—worse than any bizarre death he'd felt in previous resentments.

That awfulness came from helplessness and despair toward reality.

As a resentment experience, what he just endured was unpleasant, but the information revealed was far from negligible.

First, without any rescue, the Song of the Sea had been trapped in this sea area for at least forty-three days.

During that time, someone like Park Changmin existed on the ship—he and the captain seized control, teaching the passengers a convoluted and eerie prayer, demanding they recite it.

The resentment's owner couldn't perceive it, but Wu Chang detected from the brief prayers that the strange incantation twisted people's minds, causing passengers to fall into corruption without realizing it.

Second, during the entrapment, hunger was the first problem to face.

!

The ship's supplies were nowhere near enough to sustain a thousand people for over forty days; hunger would drive people mad, stripping away reason.

The good news was, there were fish in this sea area—huge ones.

The resentment's owner had seen the fish caught; they were grotesque, each three or four meters long, fond of flesh and blood, powerful enough that ordinary nets and fishing lines struggled to catch them.

Though they looked like they'd drunk too much nuclear wastewater from Pen Island, what truly affected them was mystical contamination.

To ordinary people, those fish were merely delicious; to him, they were potent nourishment.

Wu Chang left the room and continued walking deeper into the passenger cabins.

Along the way, he encountered several more resentments—their scenes resembled the first one.

Half were people who had committed offenses: hoarding food or stealing others' rations, thrown overboard as fish bait.

The other half mostly stemmed from conflicts among themselves.

Affected by hunger and the strange prayer, the passengers had become exceptionally volatile and combative.

He walked the length of the cabins until he reached the main hall.

The floor of the hall was stained with a vast, crimson mark resembling a pool of blood—not from one person, but like the evil presence in "Sui Sui Ping An," originating from a collective.

Wu Chang looked down at the mark beneath his feet and saw a vortex forming in the blood pool, swallowing his consciousness.

When he came to, he was now in third-person perspective, hovering above the ceiling of the hall, looking down.

In the center of the hall, over a hundred people had their hands bound with zip ties and knelt on the ground.

Their composition was complex: crew members, soldiers, burly men in civilian clothes, and many young people who looked like university students.

Each bore injuries—they'd clearly been beaten badly before being restrained.

The captain of the Song of the Sea, accompanied by his crew and seventy or eighty followers of the Xinyuzhou Sect, surrounded them. They held steel pipes, blades, and a few carried guns.

From the state of both sides, it seemed a failed uprising had just occurred.

The leader of the defeated side, dressed as the ship's first mate, was bloodied all over his face but still refused to submit, shouting at the captain:

"Jung Seong-hoon, you bastard, are you insane?! These monsters are deliberately provoking conflict to make us kill each other! You're collaborating with them—do you really think they'll spare you afterward?!"

The captain of the Song of the Sea shook his head. "Chanwoo, who taught you to speak to your elders like that? Someone go teach this dog a lesson in manners."

A crew member stepped forward and swung a steel pipe at the first mate's face—brutal, crushing two of his front teeth.

But the first mate only sneered, spat out his teeth, and kept cursing through his broken mouth.

The captain scratched his ear, growing impatient.

He looked at the other defeated rebels and smiled. "You're all heretics who question my Lord. By right, you all deserve to die. Do you know? Fire, impalement, hanging, the rack, the iron maiden—which do you prefer?"

"Have you seen the storage room on the first deck? Puzhu Sect knew you'd encounter these damned heretics—they specially replicated the full set of medieval torture tools for heretics. These tools date back to the Middle Ages."

The captain took a deep breath, his face lighting up with delight, as if eager for the show about to unfold.

"When they slowly tear you apart, shred you limb by limb, you'll feel the weight of history, the accumulation of a thousand years of religion. Far better than dying by guns or blades—soulless weapons. You're truly blessed."

Most of the rebels were young, inspired by the first mate's call, swept up in a surge of hot-blooded fervor and joining the revolt.

After the rebellion failed and their hot-blooded fervor cooled, they'd already begun regretting and fearing—now, hearing the captain's words, they were utterly terrified.

Had they known this would happen, they'd have preferred to die fighting like their comrades rather than be left alive now.

Seeing them tremble, the captain's expression grew even more satisfied.

"Now, I'll give you one chance to repent and join us."

He threw a dagger onto the floor, kicked it into the crowd, and pointed at the first mate.

"To turn from evil, you must bathe in the blood of heretics. Kill him, and you may join us."

The next moment, people went mad, scrambling for the dagger.

Minutes later, a burly, bald man with a double-door haircut snatched the dagger from the crowd, gripped it with both hands, and plunged it into the first mate's chest.

The first mate collapsed and died on the spot.

The captain waved his hand, signaling the burly man to come forward. He cut the zip ties from the man's wrists and smiled. "Welcome to our fold."

A bald man who'd lost the dagger fight at the last moment spoke up: "What about us?"

The captain gave a glance to a crew member, who understood instantly, pulled out a sack, and poured out a dozen more daggers.

"I just said: to turn from evil, you must bathe in the blood of heretics. Play your game. Only half of you will leave this hall alive."

As he spoke, the captain pulled up a chair and sat down, ready to enjoy the coming slaughter. He'd just sat when he suddenly remembered something and shouted:

"Wait!"

Everyone looked at him with hope, thinking his conscience had stirred and the situation might turn around—but the captain said:

"Your sins run too deep, so I've changed my mind—only a quarter. Those who survive are responsible for collecting the blood properly; fresh blood must not be wasted. The ritual still needs the blood of two hundred more people."

The vision within the grievance ended here. Wu Chang came back to himself, and a line of blood-colored last words floated before his eyes.

【Kill the captain!】

Wu Chang stared at the blood-colored last words in silence. No—I mean, where am I supposed to find the captain of the Sea's Song who killed all of you?

If there's no other way, I'll take out the captain of the Star Leap and burn him over to you—can you make do with that?

They're all captains anyway, and they're all in league with the Xinyuzhou Sect.

Just as he was trying to negotiate terms with the grievance, his spiritual sense stirred—he sensed a fluctuation of occult energy below.

Beneath them, it seemed someone was fighting.

(End of chapter)