Chapter 23 Let's Set Sail, ███! "The Shrine."...
That's easy for you to say, but where are you going to find one?
Xue Chao retreated, but the curtains were suddenly pulled open, and the woman in the purple dress stared straight at him through her mask.
Behind her, people were standing by the other windows in the hall. An ominous premonition instantly crept into his brain. Starting from the narrow window, all the windows in the building opened one after another—those people in the hall who he could only see through the woman's shoulder and back were staring at him through another window that had opened in the building.
The man standing at the other end of the line with his back to the woman is the most direct viewer. His face appears in the semi-arched window to the left of the woman. Xue Chao can see his back and front at the same time, and he can also see the woman's back through his window.
The next second, in all the meeting rooms behind the windows, the people waiting by the door finally seemed impatient and opened the door. Then all the doors on the first to third floors opened in response, and the same crowds crowded at the doorways, staring at him.
For a moment, it seemed as if he had returned to Zuogang, but now the roles were reversed, and he was the one being watched by countless eyes without any blind spots.
"..."
Each meeting room behind a door or window is like a parallel world crammed into another meeting room, but no matter what, he is definitely "outside" the meeting room.
These people had only one goal... to "pull him into the meeting."
Everyone behind the doors and windows sprang into action, chasing after him. Xue Chao took off running, yelling, "Damn it!"
*
"Why is this so creepy? Just how big is this ship...?"
The cruise ship berthed on the left side of the right harbor is number 1 of five cruise ships, with a gross tonnage of 100,000, which is already considered a giant cruise ship by standard.
At this moment, Yan Bocheng was the only clumsy creature running wildly on the entire cruise ship, his every step echoing eight times. He clung to the door of the machine room and finally found the electronic equipment. Before he could even catch his breath, he started operating it.
"Answer it quickly, answer it quickly—ah, you're out?"
Zhu Wen, who had boarded the No. 2 cruise ship, also found an old telephone, seemingly left behind by a sailor who had tested the fog-exploration equipment. They quickly exchanged information: "Could have trapped me? I would have been out long ago. No. 2 cruise ship, are you still on No. 1?"
"Yes, I listened to you. When I got to Right Port, I boarded this ship and didn't encounter anyone. The ship is probably empty. The No. 1 isn't the largest of the five cruise ships, but it's impossible to explore everything. The instance won't give us that much time. There must be a crucial clue, right?"
“It’s impossible that there’s no one here. Don’t forget, there are smugglers in the port. There must be a connection between the ship and the building.”
"Finding a boat is the priority; who cares about the branch lines? Besides, who knows who the smugglers are? Maybe they're stealing from us?"
Zhu Wen was quite surprised: "You've stumbled upon the truth, haven't you? The smugglers are those 'Starters' on the second floor."
Yan Bocheng was stunned: "Huh?"
"They left by ship to reach the new world beyond the mist. Once you're in the fairytale kingdom, would you still want the awful real world? You'd definitely run off with all your belongings, greedy as hell," Zhu Wen said. "We can't search all the ships, so we have to search the people, especially the areas where the ships and ports connect. That way, the Voyagers and the Opposition are usually in the Right Port, so the three cruise ships in the Right Port are more likely to be there. Cruise ship number 2 isn't it, so I'll switch routes to number 1 and meet up there. If it's not there, then I'll go to number 3... zz... zz... zz."
The communication suddenly stopped, the equipment automatically shut down, like a power outage. Yan Bocheng was startled. He tried to turn on the room light, but it wouldn't turn on. The power was out.
With such a terrible system, even making a phone call can cause a disconnection. It can't possibly be the right ship. Are we taking all our belongings to the New World to live a primitive life?
He resigned himself to his fate and began to check. Being a hacker not only requires intruding into other people's systems, but also knowing how to repair circuits. With a flashlight in his mouth, he skillfully operated his chubby hands, and the computer quickly lit up again.
Standing up was even more difficult for him, a fat man. He closed his eyes to recover as if he had low blood sugar, and when he opened them again, he was face to face with his own face on the screen. But the face was not the reflection in the black screen. It was even fatter than his face, not soft, but stiff as a stone, deathly white, like a corpse soaking in stagnant water. Its eyes rolled back, staring at him, with water and seaweed dripping from its mouth and nose.
Almost instinctively, Yan Bocheng turned and ran. As he rushed out the door, he glanced back and saw "himself" propped up against the computer frame, climbing out of the computer. But his body was too big; his enlarged head was about to get stuck in the computer frame. As he struggled to break free, it was squeezed out of shape, making a series of terrifying sounds of his skull cracking. Yan Bocheng was so frightened that he dared not look at it again.
He ran frantically, "ships and ports connected"... all he could see was the sea and the gangway. Since there were no passengers on board, smuggling couldn't be done openly by people; it had to be done covertly. He figured he might as well go back to the main deck and look around from an overview.
Yan Bocheng ran upstairs with a flashlight. In real life, he lives on the second floor and has to take an elevator to move his enormous "vehicle". In the game, he was half-dead and jumped ten floors like a ball.
The potential of people in a crisis is indeed limitless. Hearing the larger ball behind him creaking and rolling around with water, Yan Bocheng's speed directly broke the company's long-distance running record for team building.
The deck was almost there. Yan Bocheng took a deep breath, preparing for his final sprint, when the child's annoying laughter poured down from above, piercing his pent-up strength. He looked down with a chill down his spine—Zhu Wen was sitting on the stair railing, with the door to the main deck behind him.
"Your face could scrape off two pounds of lard! Are you and the one behind you participating in a 'Little Pig Run'? Hahaha—"
"Stop gloating, pull me up!" Yan Bocheng lunged forward, but Zhu Wen caught his arm, kicked the door open with his leg, turned around and pulled Yan Bocheng into the deck, then used him to block the door and locked it.
The door was slammed shut with a deafening roar, the bulging door panel hitting Yan Bocheng's back so hard it nearly knocked his liver and gallbladder out of his mouth. A damp, fishy smell wafted from the crack in the door. After a while, probably realizing it couldn't be broken through, it stopped moving.
Yan Bocheng raised his hand listlessly and mouthed, "Did they leave?"
Zhu Wen made no attempt to hide his feelings, laughing heartily as he let go of her hand: "Why don't you just open the door and take a look?"
That means he's gone. The little devil will laugh at him, but he won't go so far as to deliberately kill him.
Yan Bocheng slipped and fell to the ground, panting heavily. Zhu Wen kicked him twice: "Stop resting, go to number 3."
"Are you sure this isn't it?"
"Nonsense, do you think those 'Princess and Prince' who sleep on spice pillows would ride on a haunted ship?"
"Oh..." Yan Bocheng quickly got up, but seemed to have accidentally bumped the doorknob. The doorknob turned slightly, and he subconsciously looked back. The light from the flashlight shone on the ground, illuminating the bulging shadows in the crack of the door, as if they were breathing.
!
He grabbed Zhu Wen: "Wait..." The ghost didn't leave!
"Hey, what are we waiting for!" Zhu Wen impatiently turned back and, under Yan Bocheng's horrified gaze, yanked open the door.
There was nothing in the stairwell except for the wavy watermarks left by something crawling across it.
“But I clearly saw…” Yan Bocheng wanted to point it out to Zhu Wen, but suddenly he was horrified. His sweaty hand was still gripping Zhu Wen’s wrist. But Zhu Wen hated it when people touched him dirty. Normally, he would have quickly moved away and yelled at people. Why was he letting him hold on without saying a word?
Suddenly, Zhu Wen grabbed his wrist from behind. Yan Bocheng was jolted, his blood turning cold before his thoughts could process. He looked down blankly and saw a small, white hand emerging from his sleeve, slowly cracking, with dark green scales growing from the flesh with a "sizzling" sound.
The boy's voice, muffled and hoarse like it was submerged in water, sounded like a chaotic song, and he said eerily, "Oh... you've found out."
In the stairwell, the clattering sound of a heavy body being dragged through the air rang out again.
*
"The signal is so bad? I wasn't even finished speaking." On cruise ship number 2, with his fishing line tied to the mast, Zhu Wen held up his phone, practically flying himself into the sky like a kite. "Ah, never mind!"
He immediately forgot about his companions, jumped off the mast, and swayed as if he had lost his balance. He exclaimed "Huh?" He was not even eighteen years old and did not have rheumatism. He almost fell down from this height.
Zhu Wen quickly went to the edge of the main deck, took out his patterned brown leather binoculars, and looked down. The gangway was swaying.
He looked the cruise ship up the ladder and found nothing unusual, until the camera panned to the water—the seawater surrounding the cruise ship was bubbling and boiling like a pot.
...The ship itself was also rocking, but its large size absorbed the small swaying, so it wasn't noticeable.
"What is that? A whirlpool? A tsunami? Who's making dumplings out of water?"
He leaned over the railing, half his body out, and finally caught a glimpse of long shadows swimming underwater, like the tail of a giant python, and there was more than one, crisscrossing beneath the surface. His tongue went numb: "Damn..."
*
A thin-faced man, secured by a safety rope, quickly climbed over the number "4" on the ship's sidewall, like a gecko, all the way to the main deck, where he was pulled aboard by the tattooed man: "We didn't see any hidden ship names. We don't even know what the ship we're going to board is called. What are we going to do?"
The thin-faced man is the player who escaped death from the Destiny ship. He is also the only one of the four players who boarded the Destiny ship to survive so far. He is both apprehensive and determined about which ship to board, not daring to make the same mistake "a second time". How many lives does he have to gamble with?
He bumped into the tattooed man who had just been thrown out of the dungeon. One was a champion escape artist, the other a sorcerer. He had heard of the Red and White Disciples, those mystical cultists with some strange abilities. Besides, the tattooed man had a good shot, so he could "piggyback" on the camera. They decided to team up temporarily.
When he sensed something amiss on the second floor, he jumped out of the window and escaped.
The tattooed man lived up to his expectations. Unable to use the aerial tube, he used the B-grade item "Rapid River Raft" purchased from the store to fly like a seaplane all the way to the No. 4 cruise ship docked in Zuogang.
“Such a large area, even a hundred people would need to explore it for a while. Exhaustive search won’t work.” The tattooed man gritted his teeth and made a tough decision. He knelt on the ground again, cut his hand with a knife, and began to write with the blood on it. The writing was so illegible that it looked like gibberish. “The Qihang family is waiting for the rain to stop. This rain won’t last forever. We need to finish this quickly… I’ve come to ask the gods for directions. Brother, please help me.”
The blood curse meandered and twisted, flowing filthily in the wind and rain. The tattooed man rolled his eyes upward, completely disappearing his pupils, staring at a blank white expanse. His mouth was wide open, as if he had been possessed. The fine rain falling into his mouth and tongue was like wisps of smoke flowing backward. He clasped his hands together with a "slap," as if frozen in place.
The thin-faced man had heard a little about the Red and White Disciples' method of summoning spirits, but he still got goosebumps all over: "W-how can we help?"
“He…can’t settle down, so he can’t find one…” he murmured, “…a shrine…I need to find a shrine for Him…”
"What, what publication?"
"Shrine".
The next second, the wandering blood curses seemed to come alive as they gathered at the thin-faced man's feet, climbed up his trouser legs, and spread all the way to his head, framing his frontal profile like golden light emanating from a statue of a god.
The one they were to invite was unorthodox; he had no golden aura, only bloodshed.
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