Chapter 557 – The Ghost Ship

Chapter 557 – The Ghost Ship

The ghost ship sensed that its prey had boarded and rumbled off toward the depths of the ocean.

After boarding the ghost ship, aside from Death Force and the power of curses, Mo Lan also discovered traces of spatial power and another unknown energy.

It felt somewhat familiar. After a moment’s thought, she exclaimed in surprise, “Is this… a type of energy similar to what was inside the Well of the Sky’s vortex?”

She was about to examine it more closely when a violently putrid stench invaded her nostrils. “Urgh!”

The last time she’d smelled something this foul was back in Green City.

She quickly summoned wind elements to cover her nose and mouth, blocking out the rotten stench. Once she regained her composure, she found herself staring into the bulging eyeballs of a crowd of bloated corpses.

They were squatting on the deck—some scrubbing the filthy planks, others mending holes that didn’t exist. Their bodies bore not only the marks of fish having gnawed at them, but were swollen all over like drowned giants.

Only from the grimy clothes on their bodies could one tell that they had probably once been this ship’s crew.

Whether their backs were turned to her or they were facing her, every single one of their heads had twisted around to stare at her.

Bulging, rotting eyeballs fixed on her, and sinister smiles crept across their vacant faces.

Mo Lan sighed. “How pitiful. Dead, and still forced to work on this ship for free.”

Once she could no longer smell the stench, Mo Lan found their appearance no worse than the horror movie scenes in her memory.

In the face of absolute power, horror becomes utterly unthreatening.

Setting aside their terrifying exteriors, Mo Lan genuinely felt sorry for them.

The ghost ship had become entirely alive. Broken sections would repair themselves using consumed flesh and blood, and the dirty areas could never truly be scrubbed clean.

The crew’s souls were trapped inside their rotting bodies, serving as ornaments aboard the ghost ship. They didn’t even qualify as undead creatures—they could only be called ship spirits.

Put plainly, they were nothing more than this ship’s slaves.

They diligently scared people here, yet the ghost ship wouldn’t share even a fraction of the “hunt’s” spoils with them. In times of crisis, they’d even be consumed as fuel.

“Click—” Mo Lan pulled out her camera. “Let me snap a couple photos first. This is rare photographic documentation of a ghost ship!”

The crew: “…”

As Mo Lan kept photographing, she noticed the crew growing increasingly agitated, blocking her lens. Left with no choice, she cast a feign-death spell on herself.

Death Force emanated from her body.

“???”

The crew stared at her in confusion.

Where did that big, annoying prey go?

And where did this annoying fellow creature come from?

Mo Lan had just thought she’d fooled the crew when ropes of flesh and blood lashed toward her from the ship, and the deck began oozing black slime that tried to climb up her body.

The crew shuddered to attention and lunged at her viciously.

It seemed the feign-death spell couldn’t fool this ghost ship. And it made sense—the ship had absolute control over everything else aboard. She was the sole exception. If it wasn’t going to deal with her, who would it deal with?

If infiltrating the ghost ship wasn’t an option, she’d just have to fight her way through. Besides Angels’ holy light magic, what could be more effective against undead creatures than light-element magic?

Mo Lan immediately cast a Light Shield spell. The thick shield of light enveloped her completely. Not only were the crew, the flesh ropes, and the black slime scorched into retreat by the light element, but the deck beneath her feet began to hiss and smoke.

A Peak-level Light Shield spell—this was the pinnacle of defensive light-element magic in all of Valen. Though the ghost ship was eerie, it couldn’t breach her defenses with its undead-side abilities.

Drawing on her deep reserves of Mana, Mo Lan turned what was meant to be an instant defensive spell into a sustained defensive spell, holding the Light Shield as she walked step by step toward the cabin. The crew on the deck were merely the lowest-level ship spirits—killing them would accomplish nothing.

The key was to find the “heart of the ghost ship.” Only by removing it could this vessel and its ship spirits finally rest in peace.

Beyond the attacks from the ship itself and its crew, the curse power aboard constantly tried to affect her.

However, she had crammed Curse Magic before coming, so the ghost ship’s curse power couldn’t overcome her control over curse energy—in fact, she reverse-cracked it.

This curse made a person continuously forget their memories of land, and after seven days, they would be assimilated into a “crew member,” becoming the ghost ship’s slave.

Mo Lan was completely unaffected, so she had the leisure to study the ship at her own pace.

She noticed that where her Light Shield had scorched the surface, granulation tissue quickly grew back, restoring everything to its original state.

Mo Lan couldn’t help but marvel. “As expected of the legendary eerie existence that straddles the line between living and undead! Its self-healing ability is this impressive? But no matter how impressive, surely it can’t heal infinitely?”

She couldn’t resist bombarding the deck with light-element magic, wanting to see just how long this ship could keep regenerating.

Direct bombardment was on a completely different level from the passive burns of her Light Shield—it blasted right through the deck in one shot.

Granulation tissue rapidly grew, patching the hole in the deck. Mo Lan fired off another spell.

The patching grew slower and slower, but Mo Lan’s spell-casting grew faster and faster.

Gradually, the holes could no longer be repaired. The flesh ropes then bound crew members and tossed them into the holes, using their corpses to plug the gaps.

Mo Lan kept casting. The holes grew larger despite the patching, and the crew dwindled in number.

The ghost ship’s once-cheerful rumbling grew quieter and quieter, until not a single crew member remained on the deck—and the holes could no longer be repaired at all.

Having probed the ghost ship’s self-healing limits, Mo Lan headed into the cabin.

Inside was a corridor, with portrait paintings of crew members hanging on both walls. After the ghost ship’s transformation, these had become curse paintings that targeted the mind.

Mo Lan glanced at them, then silently tossed a Cleaning spell at them.

“Much better.”

She strolled along as if nothing were amiss, admiring the paintings from who-knows-how-many years ago. Halfway down the corridor, the walls and paintings suddenly softened and distorted, pressing in toward her.

Black slime also appeared on the walls and floor.

But Mo Lan’s Light Shield spell was simply too powerful. No matter how they squeezed and seeped, nothing could so much as brush the hem of her clothes.

With each step she took forward, the walls were scorched and forced open a little wider.

She pushed through the corridor by sheer force, arriving at the dining hall and kitchen area.

A bloated, waxy-skinned Merfolk wearing an apron was stirring soup—with her fingers plunged directly into the pot.

Mo Lan locked eyes with her. The Merfolk scooped up a ladleful of soup and, smiling, offered it toward her.

Mo Lan, who had blocked all smells with wind-element magic, couldn’t detect the soup’s overpowering aroma that could reduce a person to nothing but appetite. All she saw was the Merfolk’s fingers swirling around in the broth, which disgusted her enough to hurl a Fireball that blasted both the Merfolk cook and the pot of soup into pieces.

At that moment, the wallpaper on the walls peeled away, revealing inner walls of flesh and blood. The fleshy walls pushed outward in every direction, exposing a “doorway” that led directly outside the ship. Beyond the doorway lay the abandoned dock of the pearl oyster farm.

Mo Lan had waited there for several hours before and remembered it clearly.

“What’s this? Trying to kick me out already? I haven’t found what I’m looking for yet!”

The ghost ship: “…”