Chapter 559 – The Bronze Coffin

Every bottle of wine in the wine cellar carried a different curse, and Mo Lan examined each one using Curse Revelation.

Some would make the drinker lose all courage, others would instill a revulsion toward fresh water so that only wine could quench their thirst, and still others would cause a complete loss of taste…

Mo Lan also discovered the method for lifting these wine curses—repaying wine with blood.

By piercing one’s palm with a silver dagger and repaying blood at a hundredfold ratio for however much wine was consumed, the curse could be lifted.

However, this method of lifting the curse was essentially useless. A hundredfold blood repayment meant that by the time the blood was repaid, the person would be dead.

Mo Lan collected all these wines as well.

After passing through the wine cellar, she finally arrived before the last door in the lower hold.

This door looked as though it had been soaked in blood for ages—its original material was no longer discernible.

The bone handle carried a blood-draining curse; gripping it would drain every drop of blood from one’s body.

Lifting the curse on it wasn’t difficult for Mo Lan—a simple dispel would do.

But she had no desire to grip that gore-covered door handle to open the door, so she simply blasted it open with Magic.

All cursed objects relied on a curse carrier. Destroying the carrier also lifted the curse.

Beyond the door lay a circular cabin roughly ten meters in diameter. The walls were woven from ship ribs and whale throat bones, their surfaces covered in pulsating, vein-like barnacles.

At the center of the floor was a blood pool. The viscous, dark-red liquid swirled into a vortex with the ghost ship’s rocking, emitting a stench of rust and rotting seaweed.

Three chains of flesh and blood hung from the ceiling, their ends submerged in the blood pool. The main anchor was shaped like a giant claw, each talon tip piercing through a desiccated corpse drained of all blood. The secondary chains were connected to a bronze coffin.

Mo Lan didn’t dare enter directly. The curse power in this cabin was far more concentrated than elsewhere, and the curses were far more domineering.

It was fortunate she had reached Peak level in Curse Magic before coming here, otherwise she might well have fallen victim.

The flesh-and-blood anchor chains inside the cabin couldn’t be touched. The curse on them would fill the toucher’s lungs with briny seawater, forcing them to experience the sensation of drowning and the phantom agony of maggots gnawing at their body.

Approaching the blood pool, one would hear the whispers of the dead, luring people into the pool to become the next sacrifice.

The curse on the bronze coffin was rather unusual—it wasn’t aimed at whoever opened the coffin, but at the person inside it.

The bronze coffin locked the consciousness of the person within, endlessly tormenting their soul while slowly digesting their flesh. Using the soul as fuel to sustain the ship’s operation, each time a soul was consumed, a waxy substance would seep out inside the coffin, filling in the decayed parts of the occupant’s body, keeping them perpetually in a state between life and death.

“The ghost ship’s legend of immortality—could it really have originated from this bronze coffin?!” Mo Lan exclaimed in surprise. “This isn’t immortality at all. It’s clearly an eternal prison.”

Evidently, the “person” inside this bronze coffin was the ghost ship’s living core.

Mo Lan used Magic to sever the flesh-and-blood chains. No other Magic worked—only Spatial Magic had any effect.

Even so, she couldn’t pull the bronze coffin free from the blood pool. It was so heavy it seemed fused with the ship itself, let alone dragging it out of this cabin.

With no other choice, she first destroyed the curses throughout the cabin before stepping inside to open the coffin.

Compared to moving the bronze coffin, prying open the lid was much easier.

Inside the coffin was a human male body.

Judging by his clothing, he should have been this ship’s original captain. His body had fused with the bottom of the coffin—everything below the waist had transformed into adipocere with a metallic sheen. Above the chest, a human form was still preserved.

His skin was in a semi-transparent state, and seaweed-like blood vessels crawled across the bones within, pulsating in rhythm with the vein-like barnacles on the cabin walls.

The skin on his head was especially crystalline and translucent. The skull had the texture of Crystal, and through it one could see blue skies with white clouds and the occasional fleeting silhouette of a child’s back.

The left side of his chest cavity had been opened, and inside it was empty save for a single dark-red coin with irregular edges—as if it had been violently torn—spinning ceaselessly. Tiny bone spurs had grown from its edges, stabbing deep into the surrounding wax.

As the coin spun, Mo Lan seemed to hear a faint child’s voice.

Mo Lan focused her attention to listen. It seemed to be calling out “Father”?

She had seen her fair share of human bodies—living and dead alike—but she had never seen one in such a bizarre state.

This body seemed to truly still be alive, because those half-waxified eyeballs had been staring at her from the moment she opened the coffin.

Wherever she moved, they followed.

The images flickering inside the skull—whether they were his memories or something else, she couldn’t tell.

But across his entire body, aside from that coin spinning and beating like a heart, only his eyes could still move. He was worse off than even an undead creature.

The question was: what exactly did “the heart of the ghost ship” refer to?

According to the reference materials, the heart of a ghost ship was its core. Every ghost ship had a different origin, and so each ghost ship’s heart was different.

Generally, it was some body part of the captain.

The captain in this coffin had no heart at all in his chest cavity—only a coin that beat like one. It certainly looked extraordinary, but she couldn’t be sure it was the heart.

Mo Lan thought for a moment, then simply took out the coffin where Clack slept and knocked on the lid to wake it up.

Since this was supposed to be a supreme tonic for undead creatures, it should hold an irresistible allure for them.

The little skeleton was still a bit groggy when it climbed out of the coffin, but despite having no sense of taste or smell, it made the unprecedented motion of sniffing the air. Then its head rotated a full one hundred and eighty degrees, eyes locking onto something inside the bronze coffin, its soul fire flickering with excitement.

Afraid Mo Lan wouldn’t understand, it pulled out its little notebook and laboriously drew a round object, accompanied by the words: “Want~”

Mo Lan understood. That coin was indeed the ghost ship’s heart.

“Go back for now. I’ll give it to you later,” Mo Lan said.

Clack reluctantly climbed back into its little coffin, looking back with every step.

Mo Lan put the coffin away and began studying how to extract this coin heart.

This coin also carried a curse. Anyone who touched it would suffer a psychic attack, experiencing the despair once felt by those aboard this ship. Anyone who forcibly removed the coin would be cursed into becoming the next captain.

What being captain entailed—the corpse lying in the bronze coffin made that abundantly clear.

To properly obtain the heart of the ghost ship, one had to uncover what had once happened aboard this vessel—why it had become a ghost ship—and from that, find the method to break the curse on the heart.

Only after breaking the curse and letting everyone aboard this ship find true rest could the ghost ship’s heart be safely taken.

Forcibly removing it would either invoke the curse or cause the ghost ship’s heart to perish along with the vessel.

Finding the past of a ship that had been sunk for who knows how many years was no easy task.